👀 ChangeDetection.io

AwesomeFOSS Team

Apr 7, 2024 • 4 min read

Website change detection, monitoring, alerts, notifications, restock alerts | changedetection.io

Best and simplest way to monitor websites for changes, change detection, website checker, webpage change monitoring and webpage change detection tool - with alerts and notifications!

85+ Notification formats supported!

changedetection.io (Code) is a wesite that does exactly what it sounds like it does – it lets you monitor the internet for changes to websites.

What you might not have known about changedetction.io is that it's actually a permissively licensed open source project, with over 50 contributors (majority of the work being done by dgtlmoon though), and a really solidly useful product built in the EU.

Along with being easy to self host and manage, there's also a paid service for changedetection.io which requires no servers or management on the part of the average user:

Website change detection, monitoring, alerts, notifications, restock alerts | changedetection.io

Best and simplest way to monitor websites for changes, change detection, website checker, webpage change monitoring and webpage change detection tool - with alerts and notifications!

85+ Notification formats supported!

You can watch up to 5,000 URLs, rechecking as frequently as 2 minutes, which seems quite generous for the amount of subscription.

🌠 Features

changedetection.io has a bunch of features:

Notification of changes via various channels (Email, Discord, SNS, Matrix, ...)
Browser automation (i.e. you can make the browser do actions or pretend to be a user)
Excluding and including specific parts of the page
Apache 2 F/OSS license
Easy to self-host and try out

🤖 As described by AI

Changedetection.io emerges as a pivotal tool in the domain of web page monitoring, offering a robust, open-source solution for detecting and notifying changes across websites. It stands out for its simplicity and utility, primarily designed to alert users about text changes on monitored web pages. This service not only caters to website defacement monitoring and price change notifications but also extends its utility to restock alerts, thereby serving a wide array of user needs. Its emphasis on ease of use, complemented by the ability to notify over seventy different systems—including popular platforms like Matrix, Mattermost, Nextcloud, and email—makes it a versatile tool for both personal and professional use.

Moreover, changedetection.io offers unique features that enhance its monitoring capabilities, such as the ability to perform interactive browser steps for a more refined change detection process. This allows users to configure scenarios like logging into websites, accepting cookie logins, and refining searches before detecting changes. The platform’s open-source nature encourages community engagement and continuous improvement, reflecting its commitment to providing a dynamic and feature-rich monitoring solution. Its capability to integrate with various notification systems ensures that users can receive alerts through their preferred channels, thus making it an indispensable tool for keeping abreast of website updates.

📺 Watch this

ChangeDetection.io has a Youtube Channel and they post short introductory videos with some very upbeat music that are fun to watch, with some very specific use cases:

Most people probably don't need either of these specific use cases, but it's great to see small guides to the project that are easy to follow with a beat you can tap your feet to.

👟 Getting started

It's really easy to get started with ChangeDetection.io because it's docker friendly, but it's written in Python so also available to you if you use that toolchain.

Getting started with Docker

We love projects with concise docker run commands, and changedetection.io is one of them:

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

If you get curious, changedetection.io has an official Dockerfile you can read:

They also have a docker-compose.yml that you can take a look at to run the relevant services seperately if you'd like:

🧑‍💻 Want to contribute?

As we noted earlier, changedetection.io already has over 50 contributors, and is a permissively licensed project. Issues and Pull requests are wide open to see and contribute to:

While there are ~170 open issues, there are over 800 closed, so this project is certainly doing it's best to fix bugs and improve quality, which is awesome.

Of course, to contribute to this codebase you may need to know a bit of Python.

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