How to Track Changes on Websites without RSS or Mail Subscription

How to track changes on web sites which do not offer RSS feeds or email subscriptions.

How to Track Changes on Websites without RSS or Mail Subscription
Changedetection detected a change on the StarLabs status web site

To keep up to date with software releases, updates on products, or whatever I usually use e-mail and RSS. Still miss you Google Reader!

But some websites do not offer email alerts or RSS feeds. Here I found a solution the other day. Thanks to the Self-Hosted Sub on Reddit.

Say hello 👋 to Changedetection which will show you the diff of the website you are tracking:

Changedetection showing a diff

You can add sites, customize the check interval, configure various notifications (I did set up Gmail) and even subscribe to the RSS feed for your sites!

Awesome I say!

You can just easily run it on your local machine, does not need to be on a server, if you are fine with checking only when the machine is on.

Here is the docker-compose.yaml I am using:

version: '3'
services:
  changedetection:
    image: ghcr.io/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
    container_name: changedetection
    hostname: changedetection
    volumes:
      - /data/docker/changedetection/data:/datastore
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
    ports:
      - 5000:5000
    restart: unless-stopped

There is a more extensive example with good comments on their GitHub. Check them out!

GitHub - dgtlmoon/changedetection.io: changedetection.io - The best and simplest self-hosted free open source website change detection monitoring and notification service. An alternative to Visualping, Watchtower etc. Designed for simplicity - the main goal is to simply monitor which websites had a text change for free. Free Open source web page change detection
changedetection.io - The best and simplest self-hosted free open source website change detection monitoring and notification service. An alternative to Visualping, Watchtower etc. Designed for simp...

I am running Changedetection on my Odroid HC4 and have setup E-Mail notifications via gmail. Super useful!


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