webchanges 3.6.0

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.

webchanges enables anonymous notifications.

Requirements

webchanges requires .

You should use the latest version of Python if possible. If you’re using an older version, be aware that for each minor version (3.x), only the latest bugfix release (3.x.y) is officially supported. Older Python versions are supported for 3 years after being obsoleted by a new major release.

Installation

Install webchanges with:

pip install webchanges

Documentation

The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs .

Quick Start

Initialize

1. Create the default config.yaml configuration and an empty jobs.yaml jobs files, opening an editor to add your jobs to the latter:

webchanges --edit

2. If you want to change the default configuration, e.g. to receive notifications (reports) by e-mail and/or one of many other methods, run:

webchanges --edit-config

Run

webchanges

This checks the sources in your jobs, and will report on (e.g. display) any changes from the previous run.

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; 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.

Code

The code and issues tracker are hosted on GitHub.

Contributing

We welcome any contribution, e.g. documentation, bug reports, new features, etc., as both pull requests and issues. More information for developers and documentation editors 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 many HTML-focused improvements including:

• 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 33 percentage point increase in testing coverage

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

Examples: