Jobs

Jobs are the kind of things that urlwatch can monitor.

The list of jobs to run are contained in the configuration file urls.yaml, accessed with the command urlwatch --edit, each separated by a line containing only ---.

While optional, it is recommended that each job starts with a name entry:

name: "This is a human-readable name/label of the job"

URL

This is the main job type – it retrieves a document from a web server:

name: "urlwatch homepage"
url: "https://thp.io/2008/urlwatch/"

Required keys:

• url: The URL to the document to watch for changes

Job-specific optional keys:

• cookies: Cookies to send with the request (see Advanced Topics)

• method: HTTP method to use (default: GET)

• data: HTTP POST/PUT data

• ssl_no_verify: Do not verify SSL certificates (true/false)

• ignore_cached: Do not use cache control (ETag/Last-Modified) values (true/false)

• http_proxy: Proxy server to use for HTTP requests

• https_proxy: Proxy server to use for HTTPS requests

• headers: HTTP header to send along with the request

• encoding: Override the character encoding from the server (see Advanced Topics)

• timeout: Override the default socket timeout (see Advanced Topics)

• ignore_connection_errors: Ignore (temporary) connection errors (see Advanced Topics)

• ignore_http_error_codes: List of HTTP errors to ignore (see Advanced Topics)

• ignore_timeout_errors: Do not report errors when the timeout is hit

• ignore_too_many_redirects: Ignore redirect loops (see Advanced Topics)

(Note: url implies kind: url)

Navigate

This job type is a resource-intensive variant of “URL” to handle web pages requiring JavaScript in order to render the content to be monitored.

The optional requests-html package must be installed to run “Navigate” jobs (see Dependencies).

name: "A page with JavaScript"
navigate: "https://example.org/"

Required keys:

• navigate: URL to navigate to with the browser

Job-specific optional keys:

• none

As this job uses Requests-HTML to render the page in a headless Chromium instance, it requires massively more resources than a “URL” job. Use it only on pages where url does not give the right results.

Hint: in many instances instead of using “Navigate” you can monitor the output of an API called by the site during page loading containing the information you’re after using the much faster “URL” job type.

(Note: navigate implies kind: browser)

Command

This job type allows you to watch the output of arbitrary shell commands, which is useful for e.g. monitoring a FTP uploader folder, output of scripts that query external devices (RPi GPIO), etc…

name: "What is in my Home Directory?"
command: "ls -al ~"

Required keys:

• command: The shell command to execute

Job-specific optional keys:

• none

(Note: command implies kind: shell)

Optional keys for all job types

• name: Human-readable name/label of the job

• filter: filters (if any) to apply to the output

• max_tries: Number of times to retry fetching the resource

• diff_tool: Command to a custom tool for generating diff text

• compared_versions: Number of versions to compare for similarity

• kind (redundant): Either url, shell or browser. Automatically derived from the unique key (url, command or navigate) of the job type