What Website and Webpage Changes Easily with this amazing App: ChangeDetection

What Website and Webpage Changes Easily with this amazing App: ChangeDetection

Imagine never missing an update on your favorite websites, monitoring price changes, or even tracking PDF file modifications.

Sounds like a dream, right? Well, no more. Introducing Changedetection.io - the most straightforward, free, open-source web page change detection tool.

Changedetection.io acts as your personal website watcher, restock monitor, and notification service. The beauty of this tool lies in its simplicity. It allows you to monitor text changes on websites for free, making it an invaluable resource for those who need to stay informed about constant online updates.

One of the significant features of Changedetection.io is its interactive browser steps. You can fill in text boxes, click buttons, and more, essentially setting up your change detection scenario. This feature is especially useful for performing activities like logging into websites, adding products to a cart, accepting cookie logins, entering dates, and refining searches.

Once you've run the browser steps, you can visit the Visual Selector tab to narrow down the content you're interested in. This feature requires Playwright to be enabled, but it adds another layer of specificity to your change detection process.

There are countless ways to utilize this tool. You can use it to monitor products and services for a change in pricing. It's perfect for out-of-stock notifications and 'back in stock' alerts. You can even track text changes in PDF files.

It's also a great tool for keeping tabs on governmental department updates, new software releases, security advisories, festivals with changes, and Discogs restock alerts and monitoring.

In the world of constant digital changes, staying updated can be a challenge. With Changedetection.io, you'll never miss an important update again. Embrace the convenience of this open-source tool and take control of the digital world.

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

Powerful Chrome Extension

The app also offers a powerful user-friendly extension, to easily add webpages to monitor and notify when changes.

Useful 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

Install and Run using Docker

First you should have Docker and Docker compose installed, then clone the repo, and run:

$ docker compose up -d

If you want to use Docker Standalone:

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

License

The app is released under the Apache-2.0 License.

Source-code and download