If you want to stay updated on news from various websites, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) [1] is a great solution. Many websites offer their news in an RSS feed, which is an XML file with a specific format. You can subscribe to these feeds and read the content in RSS feed readers, which can be graphical, command-line, or web-based clients.
However, not all websites provide an RSS feed, and RSS usage seems to have diminished somewhat in recent years. Moreover, not all websites offer their content in the form of articles. Still, you may want to know about changes on these websites, such as the price of your favorite product on an online store or a new page in the table of contents of an online document. Are you then doomed to regularly visit all those websites you’re interested in?
With changedetection.io [2], you can monitor arbitrary changes on web pages and be notified in various ways. At first glance, changedetection.io’s website (Figure 1) seems to suggest it is a commercial service that requires a monthly subscription fee. However, changedetection.io is a completely open source project, with its source code [3] published under the Apache 2.0 license. The developer simply offers this solution as a subscription to fund development.
Installing changedetection.io
Changedetection.io is a Python program, which you can install using Python’s package manager pip. However, because you probably want to run this continuously as a service, it makes sense to run it in a Docker container. On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, install Docker and Docker Compose with
Then add your user to the docker group:
Log out and log in again to apply the group membership. Next, create a data directory for the container:
Then create a docker-compose.yml file with the content from Listing 1.
Of course, you need to modify the path in the volume to match your user’s home directory. Now, start changedetection.io with:
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