webchanges

webchanges anonymously checks web content (including images) and commands for changes, delivering instant notifications and AI-powered summaries to your favorite platform.

Highlights

• AI-powered change summaries via Gemini (ai_google differ, BETA).
• Structural diffs for JSON and XML via the deepdiff differ.
• Visual diffs for images via the image differ (BETA).
• Bypass TLS/JA3 fingerprinting with the optional curl_cffi HTTP client.
• JSON-Schema-validated jobs.yaml and config.yaml for editor autocompletion and inline validation.

Requirements

webchanges requires . For the best experience, use the current version of Python; older Python versions are supported for 3 years after they're replaced. Free-threaded Python is supported, though some optional dependencies may not be.

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

Installation

Install webchanges with uv (recommended):

uv pip install webchanges

or with pip:

pip install webchanges

Other ways to run

• In a Docker container: a minimal implementation (no browser) is here, and one with a browser is here.
• As a GitHub Action: an implementation is here.

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-jobs

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 last time the program ran, just run:

webchanges

Schedule

webchanges leverages the power of a system scheduler:

• On Linux you can use cron, with the help of a tool like crontab.guru (help here);
• On Windows you can use Windows Task Scheduler;
• On macOS you can use launchd (help here).

Code

The code, issues tracker, and discussions 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

See the complete licenses (released under the MIT License but redistributing modified source code, dated 30 July 2020, from urlwatch 2.21 licensed under a BSD 3-Clause License).

Relationship with urlwatch

This project is a fork of urlwatch 2.21 and has since added many features; see the comparison.