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Change Detection
Change Detection

Change Detection

 15.0k 839
Utils Monitoring Web
01 May, 2024
  Python

What is Change Detection ?

Change Detection is an open source website change detection, website watcher, restock monitor and notification service. Restock Monitor, change detection. Designed for simplicity - Simply monitor which websites had a text change for free. Free Open source web page change detection, Website defacement monitoring, Price change notification

Change Detection Features

  • Chrome browser included.
  • Nothing to install, access via browser login after signup.
  • Super fast, no registration needed setup.
  • Get started watching and receiving website change notifications straight away.
  • See our tutorials and how-to page for more inspiration

Target specific parts of the webpage using the Visual Selector tool.

Available when connected to a playwright content fetcher (included as part of our subscription service)

Select parts and elements of a web page to monitor for changes

Easily see what changed, examine by word, line, or individual character.

Self-hosted web page change monitoring context difference

Perform interactive browser steps

Fill in text boxes, click buttons and more, setup your changedetection scenario.

Using the Browser Steps configuration, add basic steps before performing change detection, such as logging into websites, adding a product to a cart, accept cookie logins, entering dates and refining searches.

Website change detection with interactive browser steps, detect changes behind login and password, search queries and more

After Browser Steps have been run, then visit the Visual Selector tab to refine the content you’re interested in. Requires Playwright to be enabled.

Example use cases

  • Products and services have a change in pricing
  • Out of stock notification and Back In stock notification
  • Monitor and track PDF file changes, know when a PDF file has text changes.
  • Governmental department updates (changes are often only on their websites)
  • New software releases, security advisories when you’re not on their mailing list.
  • Festivals with changes
  • Discogs restock alerts and monitoring
  • Realestate listing changes
  • Know when your favourite whiskey is on sale, or other special deals are announced before anyone else
  • COVID related news from government websites
  • University/organisation news from their website
  • Detect and monitor changes in JSON API responses
  • JSON API monitoring and alerting
  • Changes in legal and other documents
  • Trigger API calls via notifications when text appears on a website
  • Glue together APIs using the JSON filter and JSON notifications
  • Create RSS feeds based on changes in web content
  • Monitor HTML source code for unexpected changes, strengthen your PCI compliance
  • You have a very sensitive list of URLs to watch and you do not want to use the paid alternatives. (Remember, you are the product)
  • Get notified when certain keywords appear in Twitter search results
  • Proactively search for jobs, get notified when companies update their careers page, search job portals for keywords.
  • Get alerts when new job positions are open on Bamboo HR and other job platforms
  • Website defacement monitoring
  • Pokémon Card Restock Tracker / Pokémon TCG Tracker
  • RegTech - stay ahead of regulatory changes, regulatory compliance

Need an actual Chrome runner with Javascript support? We support fetching via WebDriver and Playwright!

Key Features

  • Lots of trigger filters, such as “Trigger on text”, “Remove text by selector”, “Ignore text”, “Extract text”, also using regular-expressions!
  • Target elements with xPath(1.0) and CSS Selectors, Easily monitor complex JSON with JSONPath or jq
  • Switch between fast non-JS and Chrome JS based “fetchers”
  • Track changes in PDF files (Monitor text changed in the PDF, Also monitor PDF filesize and checksums)
  • Easily specify how often a site should be checked
  • Execute JS before extracting text (Good for logging in, see examples in the UI!)
  • Override Request Headers, Specify POST or GET and other methods
  • Use the “Visual Selector” to help target specific elements
  • Configurable proxy per watch
  • Send a screenshot with the notification when a change is detected in the web page

We recommend and use Bright Data global proxy services, Bright Data will match any first deposit up to $100 using our signup link.

Oxylabs is also an excellent proxy provider and well worth using, they offer Residental, ISP, Rotating and many other proxy types to suit your project.

Please :star: star :star: this project and help it grow! https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/

Install Change Detection

Docker

With Docker composer, just clone this repository and..

Terminal window
$ docker compose up -d

Docker standalone

Terminal window
$ docker run -d --restart always -p "127.0.0.1:5000:5000" -v datastore-volume:/datastore --name changedetection.io dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

:latest tag is our latest stable release, :dev tag is our bleeding edge master branch.

Alternative docker repository over at ghcr - ghcr.io/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

Windows

See the install instructions at the wiki https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/wiki/Microsoft-Windows

Python Pip

Check out our pypi page https://pypi.org/project/changedetection.io/

Terminal window
$ pip3 install changedetection.io
$ changedetection.io -d /path/to/empty/data/dir -p 5000

Then visit http://127.0.0.1:5000 , You should now be able to access the UI.

Now with per-site configurable support for using a fast built in HTTP fetcher or use a Chrome based fetcher for monitoring of JavaScript websites!

Updating Change Detection

Docker

docker pull dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
docker kill $(docker ps -a -f name=changedetection.io -q)
docker rm $(docker ps -a -f name=changedetection.io -q)
docker run -d --restart always -p "127.0.0.1:5000:5000" -v datastore-volume:/datastore --name changedetection.io dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

docker compose

Terminal window
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

See the wiki for more information https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/wiki

Filters

XPath(1.0), JSONPath, jq, and CSS support comes baked in! You can be as specific as you need, use XPath exported from various XPath element query creation tools. (We support LXML re:test, re:match and re:replace.)

Notifications

ChangeDetection.io supports a massive amount of notifications (including email, office365, custom APIs, etc) when a web-page has a change detected thanks to the apprise library. Simply set one or more notification URL’s in the [edit] tab of that watch.

Just some examples

discord://webhook_id/webhook_token
flock://app_token/g:channel_id
gitter://token/room
gchat://workspace/key/token
msteams://TokenA/TokenB/TokenC/
o365://TenantID:AccountEmail/ClientID/ClientSecret/TargetEmail
rocket://user:password@hostname/#Channel
mailto://user:[email protected][email protected]
json://someserver.com/custom-api
syslog://

And everything else in this list!

Self-hosted web page change monitoring notifications

Now you can also customise your notification content and use Jinja2 templating for their title and body!

JSON API Monitoring

Detect changes and monitor data in JSON API’s by using either JSONPath or jq to filter, parse, and restructure JSON as needed.

image

This will re-parse the JSON and apply formatting to the text, making it super easy to monitor and detect changes in JSON API results

image

JSONPath or jq?

For more complex parsing, filtering, and modifying of JSON data, jq is recommended due to the built-in operators and functions. Refer to the documentation for more specific information on jq.

One big advantage of jq is that you can use logic in your JSON filter, such as filters to only show items that have a value greater than/less than etc.

See the wiki https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/wiki/JSON-Selector-Filter-help for more information and examples

Parse JSON embedded in HTML!

When you enable a json: or jq: filter, you can even automatically extract and parse embedded JSON inside a HTML page! Amazingly handy for sites that build content based on JSON, such as many e-commerce websites.

<html>
...
<script type="application/ld+json">


{
   "@context":"http://schema.org/",
   "@type":"Product",
   "offers":{
      "@type":"Offer",
      "availability":"http://schema.org/InStock",
      "price":"3949.99",
      "priceCurrency":"USD",
      "url":"https://www.newegg.com/p/3D5-000D-001T1"
   },
   "description":"Cobratype King Cobra Hero Desktop Gaming PC",
   "name":"Cobratype King Cobra Hero Desktop Gaming PC",
   "sku":"3D5-000D-001T1",
   "itemCondition":"NewCondition"
}
</script>

json:$..price or jq:..price would give 3949.99, or you can extract the whole structure (use a JSONpath test website to validate with)

The application also supports notifying you that it can follow this information automatically

Proxy Configuration

See the wiki https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/wiki/Proxy-configuration , we also support using Bright Data proxy services where possible and Oxylabs proxy services.

Raspberry Pi support?

Raspberry Pi and linux/arm/v6 linux/arm/v7 arm64 devices are supported! See the wiki for details

Import support

Easily import your list of websites to watch for changes in Excel .xslx file format, or paste in lists of website URLs as plaintext.

Excel import is recommended - that way you can better organise tags/groups of websites and other features.

API Support

Supports managing the website watch list via our API

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