webchanges 3.4.0

Check web (or commands) for changes since last run and notify.

webchanges checks web content (or the output of local commands) for changes, and notifies you via e-mail or one of many other supported services if one is detected. The notification includes the changed URL or command and a summary of what has changed. This project is a fork of urlwatch as suggested by its author to optimize it for HTML.

Installation

webchanges is available on PyPI for (Python versions are supported for 3 years after being obsoleted by a new major release) and can be installed using pip:

pip install webchanges

Optional dependencies may be needed; see here.

Documentation

The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs .

Code

The code and issues tracker are hosted on GitHub.

Quick Start

1. Run webchanges --edit to customize your job list (this will create jobs.yaml and config.yaml)

2. Run webchanges --edit-config if you want to set up e-mail sending

webchanges will check for changes every time you run it, but does not include a scheduler. We recommend using a system scheduler to automatically run webchanges periodically:

• In Linux, you can use cron; crontab.guru will build a schedule expression for you. If you have never used cron before, see here.

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

Contributing

We welcome any contribution, e.g. documentation, bug reports, new features, etc., as both pull requests and issues. More information for developers and documenters is here, and our wishlist is here.

License

Released under the MIT License, but including code licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. See the license here.

Improvements from urlwatch

You can seamlessly upgrade from urlwatch 2.23 (see here) and benefit from these HTML-focused improvements:

• Links are clickable!

• Formatting such as bolding / headers, italics, underlining, list bullets (•) and indentation is preserved

• Uses color and strikethrough to highlight added and deleted lines and long lines wrap around

• HTML is rendered correctly by email clients who override stylesheets (e.g. Gmail)

• Other legibility improvements

• Multiple changes to how Pyppeteer is run (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

• Better documentation

• More reliability and stability, including a 22 percentage point increase in testing coverage

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

Examples: