webchanges 3.12

Check web (or command output) for changes since last run and notify. Anonymously alerts you of webpage changes.

webchanges checks web content and notifies you via e-mail (or one of many other supported services) if a change is detected. webchanges can also check the output of local commands. The notification includes the changed URL or command and a summary (diff) of what has changed.

webchanges anonymously alerts you of webpage changes.

Requirements

webchanges requires .

You should use the latest version of Python if possible, but older Python versions are supported for 3 years after being obsoleted by a new major release (3.x). For each major release, only the latest bug and security fix version (3.x.y) is supported.

Installation

Install webchanges with:

pip install webchanges

Documentation

The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs .

Quick Start

Initialize

1. Run the following command to create the default config.yaml (configuration) and jobs.yaml (jobs) files and open an editor to add your jobs:

   webchanges --edit

2. Run the following command to change the default configuration, e.g. to receive change notifications (”reports”) by e-mail and/or one of many other methods:

   webchanges --edit-config

Run

To check the sources in your jobs and report on (e.g. display or via e-mail) any changes found from the previous execution, just run:

webchanges

webchanges does not include a scheduler. We recommend using a system scheduler to automatically run webchanges periodically:

• On Linux or macOS, you can use cron (if you have never used cron before, see here); crontab.guru will build a schedule expression for you.

• On Windows, you can use the built-in Windows Task Scheduler.

Code

The code and issues tracker are hosted on GitHub.

Contributing

We welcome any contribution no matter how small as both pull requests and issue reports.

More information for developers and documentation contributors is here, and our wishlist is here.

License

Released under the MIT License but redistributing modified source code from urlwatch 2.21 licensed under a BSD 3-Clause License. See the complete license here.

Compatibility with urlwatch

This project is based on urlwatch 2.21. You can easily upgrade from urlwatch 2.25 (see here) using the same job and configuration files and benefit from many HTML-focused improvements, including:

• Report links that are clickable!

• Original formatting such as bolding / headers, italics, underlining, list bullets (•) and indentation;

• Added and deleted lines clearly highlighted by color and strikethrough, and long lines that wrap around;

• Correct rendering by email clients who override stylesheets (e.g. Gmail);

• Other legibility improvements;

• Use of stable Playwright instead of buggy Pyppeteer for websites that need JavaScript rendering before capture, increasing stability, reliability, flexibility and control;

• New filters such as additions_only, which makes it easier to track content that was added without the distractions of the content that was deleted;

• Much better documentation;

• More reliability and stability, including a 39 percentage point increase in testing coverage to 81%;

• Many other additions, refinements and fixes (see detailed information).

Examples: