Website Change Detector 🌐

A self-hosted program, which detects when a website's contents are updated (a website has changed) and notifies you about it.

Not many services exist (that I can find of) which notify you about changes in websites that you might want to track. Some do, but they're either paid or limited in how many websites you can track.
All this could be overcome for free, if you have some programming background and time.

I created this Change Detector, to batch check the websites which are on my monitoring list which I can run on my own server, or on the cloud and works according to how I want. I am aiming for this project to have the same features as offered by other paid services by using the power of Open-Source Community. And Time.

GPL License will guarantee that derivatives of this project remain open-sourced

How to Use:

1. Save the websites you want to check in the csv file config.csv as:
   (4 columns used as of latest commit)

    1 | <<webpage 1 name>>, <<webpage 1 url to check>>, <<OPTIONAL timeout for finding delta change>>, <<OPTIONAL: True/False whether to verify SSL or not; default value in program is True>>
    2 | <<webpage 2 name>>, <<webpage 2 url to check>>, <<OPTIONAL timeout for finding delta change>>, <<OPTIONAL: True/False whether to verify SSL or not; default value in program is True>>
   

   • Note that you do not need to write any "csv headings". just directly follow this format.
   • If you get SSLError, then you must write false in the 4th column for the respective webpage.

2. Run main.py (python3 main.py).
   By default program will with default settings. You can configure some of them, by passing them as command line arguments.
   Snip of python3 main.py -h or python3 main.py --help:

   usage: main.py [-h] [-w XhYmZ] [-c filename] [-d] [-t HH:MM]
   
   This program checks from the supplied list of webpages, that if anyone of
   those have changed and notifies about it.
   
   optional arguments:
     -h, --help            show this help message and exit
     -w XhYmZ, --wait XhYmZ
                           The duration for which the program should wait before
                           checking the page again. Defaults to 2 hours. Use
                           compound duration say 2h
     -c filename, --config filename
                           use the specified file instead of default config.csv
     -d, --debug           Increase logging level of program to debug. AKA
                           increases verbosity of program
     -t HH:MM, --time HH:MM
                           time to send a daily alert notifying that the program
                           is working. Enter time in HH:MM 24 hour format.
                           Otherwise uses program's default time of 14:00 IST
   

3. Changes will be notified by Telegram .
   You need to create your own bot, and enter your own bot TOKEN and your CHAT_ID either on line 26 and 27 in main.py in the function alert_onTelegram() or create a file same as telegram_tokens.json and enter your CHAT_ID and TOKEN in either str or int there.

How it works:

To be written... (For the time being, currently the program calls bash's diff command to check for changes)

ToDo:

• Have a better Logging format.
• Skipping the webpage when any critical error/exception is encountered instead of stopping the execution of program.
• Ability to add more websites to the list without stopping the program.
• Check for constant changes ( aka ∆change ) daily.
  some websites have messed up code changing daily, which needs to be "intelligently" identified if the change is some daily-occurring change (such as day/date) or an actual change.
  much better way would be to reply back to the bot about the False Positive, and the bot will then add it to list_ofDeltaChange
• Generate the before and after screenshots (much like how Visualping does).
• Give a better name to the project?

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Feel free to find and open issues or contribute in this project if you can!

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