Deploy changedetection.io in one click

What is changedetection.io?

changedetection.io watches web pages and tells you when they change. People use it for price drops and products back in stock, job openings, government notices, release notes and documents that change without a word, in place of Visualping or Distill.io. Each watch checks its page on a schedule, every three hours unless you set another, and shows what changed word by word, line by line or character by character.

It can watch only the part of a page that matters, picked by a CSS selector, XPath or, for JSON, JSONPath or jq, and trigger on a text, ignore another, or follow a product’s price and stock. It reads PDF files too. Alerts go to more than 85 services through Apprise, such as email, Telegram, Discord, Slack and ntfy, and every change is also in an RSS feed.

This template runs changedetection.io with its plain, fast fetcher, its data in a volume and the password you give from the first start, so its page is never open to anyone. It fetches pages as they are sent: the Visual Selector, Browser Steps and pages whose text is drawn by JavaScript need a Chrome fetcher, which the template leaves out to stay light.

Hosting changedetection.io on Pethost

1. You sign in to Pethost with a passkey, GitHub or Google. No machine yet? You pick a plan, and the link waits until it is ready.
2. New project opens at changedetection.io. You fill in what it asks for and click Create project: Password.
3. In a minute or two changedetection.io is live at its own address with HTTPS. Its secrets are made at random, and its data is in the nightly backup.
4. It is a project like any other: you or your agent can change it, roll it back or restore it.

Questions about changedetection.io

changedetection.io Docker Compose file

The template is this compose.yaml and the variables written into the project’s .env as it is created. Pethost runs the file as it is written.

Containers: changedetection (dgtlmoon/changedetection.io:0.60).

Volumes, in the nightly backup: datastore.

services:
  changedetection:
    image: dgtlmoon/changedetection.io:0.60
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      BASE_URL: ${URL}
      ADMIN_PASSWORD: ${ADMIN_PASSWORD}
      # The sites watched do not see this address as the referrer of each check.
      HIDE_REFERER: "true"
    # changedetection.io has one password and none at first, so its page would be open to anyone
    # until it is set. SALTED_PASS gives it the password from the first start, salted and hashed as
    # changedetection.io stores one; its settings cannot remove it.
    command:
      - sh
      - -c
      - |
        SALTED_PASS=$$(python3 -c '
        import base64, hashlib, os
        salt = os.urandom(32)
        key = hashlib.pbkdf2_hmac("sha256", os.environ["ADMIN_PASSWORD"].encode(), salt, 100000)
        print(base64.b64encode(salt + key).decode())
        ') || exit 1
        export SALTED_PASS
        unset ADMIN_PASSWORD
        exec python ./changedetection.py -d /datastore
    volumes:
      - datastore:/datastore

volumes:
  datastore:

compose.yamlSee it on GitHub