| URLWATCH-INTRO(7) | urlwatch 2.25 Documentation | URLWATCH-INTRO(7) |
urlwatch-intro - Introduction to basic urlwatch usage
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:
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.
Each job must have exactly one of the following keys, which also defines the kind of job:
Each job can have an optional name key to define a user-visible name for the job.
You can then use optional keys to finely control various job's parameters.
See urlwatch-jobs(5) for detailed information on job configuration.
You may use the filter key to select one or more filters to apply to the data after it is retrieved, for example to:
These filters can be chained. As an example, after retrieving an HTML document by using the url key, you can extract a selection with the xpath filter, convert this to text with html2text, use grep to extract only lines matching a specific regular expression, and then sort them:
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: ---
See urlwatch-filters(5) for detailed information on filter configuration.
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:
See urlwatch-reporters(5) for reporter configuration options.
urlwatch(1), urlwatch-jobs(5), urlwatch-filters(5), urlwatch-config(5), urlwatch-reporters(5), cron(8)
2022 Thomas Perl
| March 15, 2022 | urlwatch 2.25 |