urlwatch-intro - Man Page

1. Run urlwatch once to migrate your old data or start fresh
2. Use urlwatch --edit to customize jobs and filters (urls.yaml)
3. Use urlwatch --edit-config to customize settings and reporters (urlwatch.yaml)
4. Add urlwatch to your crontab (crontab -e) to monitor webpages periodically

The checking interval is defined by how often you run urlwatch. You can use e.g. crontab.guru <https://crontab.guru> to figure out the schedule expression for the checking interval, we recommend not more often than 30 minutes (this would be */30 * * * *). If you have never used cron before, check out the crontab command help <https://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucrontab.htm>.

On Windows, cron is not installed by default. Use the Windows Task Scheduler <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Task_Scheduler> instead, or see this StackOverflow question <https://stackoverflow.com/q/132971/1047040> for alternatives.

Every time you run urlwatch(1), it:

• retrieves the output of each job and filters it
• compares it with the version retrieved the previous time ("diffing")
• if it finds any differences, it invokes enabled reporters (e.g. text reporter, e-mail reporter, ...) to notify you of the changes

Each website or shell command to be monitored constitutes a "job".

The instructions for each such job are contained in a config file in the YAML format <https://yaml.org/spec/>. If you have more than one job, you separate them with a line containing only ---.

You can edit the job and filter configuration file using:

urlwatch --edit

If you get an error, set your $EDITOR (or $VISUAL) environment variable in your shell, for example:

export EDITOR=/bin/nano

While you can edit the YAML file manually, using --edit will do sanity checks before activating the new configuration file.

name: "Sample urlwatch job definition"
url: "https://example.dummy/"
https_proxy: "http://dummy.proxy/"
max_tries: 2
filter:
  - xpath: '//section[@role="main"]'
  - html2text:
      method: pyhtml2text
      unicode_snob: true
      body_width: 0
      inline_links: false
      ignore_links: true
      ignore_images: true
      pad_tables: false
      single_line_break: true
  - grep: "lines I care about"
  - sort:
---

urlwatch can be configured to do something with its report besides (or in addition to) the default of displaying it on the console.

Reporters are configured in the global configuration file:

urlwatch --edit-config

Examples of reporters:

• email (using SMTP)
• email using mailgun
• slack
• discord
• pushbullet
• telegram
• matrix
• pushover
• stdout
• xmpp
• shell

See urlwatch-reporters(5) for reporter configuration options.

urlwatch(1), urlwatch-jobs(5), urlwatch-filters(5), urlwatch-config(5), urlwatch-reporters(5), cron(8)

2023 Thomas Perl

urlwatch(1), urlwatch-config(5), urlwatch-cookbook(7), urlwatch-reporters(5).