webchanges

webchanges checks web content including images, and notifies you via email (or one of many other supported services) if a change is detected. webchanges can also check the output of local commands. The notification includes a detail of what has changed ("diff"), with an optional summary generated by AI (BETA).

webchanges anonymously alerts you of web 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.

For Generative AI summaries (BETA), you need a free API Key from Google Cloud AI Studio (see here).

Installation

Install webchanges with:

pip install webchanges

Running in Docker

webchanges can be run in a Docker container. Please see here for one such implementation.

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 email 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 email) 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 macOS, you can use launchd <https://developer.apple .com/library/archive/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/ScheduledJobs.html>__
• 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, both as pull requests or issue reports.

More information for code 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 dated 30 July 2020 licensed under a BSD 3-Clause License. See the complete license here.

Compatibility with and improvements from urlwatch

This project is based on code from urlwatch 2.21 dated 30 July 2020. You can easily upgrade to webchanges from the current version of urlwatch using the same job and configuration files (see here) and benefit from many improvements, including:

• Summary of changes in plain text using Generative AI, useful for long, boring, legal documents;
• Depicting changes to an image;
• Element-by-element changes of JSON or XML data;
• Much better documentation;
• Many improvements to HTML reports, including:
  • Links that are clickable!
  • Retaining of 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;
• 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;
• New command line arguments such as --errors to catch jobs that no longer work;
• More reliability and stability, including a ~30 percentage point increase in testing coverage;
• Many other additions, refinements and fixes (see detailed information).

Examples: