urlwatch: a tool for monitoring webpages for updates

urlwatch is intended to help you watch changes in webpages and get notified (via email, in your terminal or with a custom-written reporter class) of any changes. The change notification will include the URL that has changed and a unified diff of what has changed.

urlwatch is open source under a BSD-style license.

Features

• Extensible YAML-based configuration file, minidb-based cache
• Uses Concurrent downloads and If-Modified-Since for speed
• Support for using HTTP POST with data and custom HTTP methods
• Convert HTML to plaintext using lynx, html2text or a regex
• Watch output of shell commands, create custom job types
• Wide range of built-in filters, and support for writing your own
• Send changes via e-mail, optionally also as HTML
• Colored diff output on the console (can be turned off)
• Sends a proper User-agent header

Installation

If you have Python 3 and pip (the Python package manager) installed, you can install the latest version and its dependencies using the following command:

pip3 install urlwatch

Download

• Current version: urlwatch-2.6.tar.gz (2016-12-04)

• Git: github.com/thp/urlwatch
• PyPI: urlwatch
• Arch Linux: urlwatch (by Balló György)
• Gentoo: www-misc/urlwatch (by Patrice Clement)
• NixOS: urlwatch

The following distributions have outdated packages (if you can, feel free to get the packages there updated, we do not recommend running old versions of urlwatch, as they are unsupported):

• Debian: needs a new maintainer -- urlwatch (see Debian bug #831272)
• Ubuntu: same situation as Debian -- urlwatch
• Fedora: outdated, last version 1.18 -- urlwatch (by Fabian Affolter)