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SiteWatcher

site-watcher

A Discord bot that alerts you when (part of) a website changes.

Features

Notify you in Discord when a website changes:
site-watcher

List of features of the site-watcher bot:

  • Add multiple sites to watcher
  • Remove site from watcher
  • Monitoring specified elements of a site, to not get notified on dynamic elements (ex. ads)
  • Checking on a specified interval (1-60 minutes, default 5).
  • Manually update tracked sites
  • Show list of tracked sites
  • Open source!

Install

Downloading the project:

  1. Create a new discord bot on discord.com/developers/applications. A tutorial can be found here.
  2. Make sure you have git and nodejs installed.
  3. Clone the repository.
  4. Open cmd.bat in the repository folder.
  5. Type npm install and press enter.

Configuring the bot:

  1. Open the .env file.
  2. Add your discord bot token after DISCORDJS_BOT_TOKEN=. You can get this token from discord.com/developers/applications.
  3. Add the channel ID from the channel you want the update notifications in after DISCORDJS_TEXTCHANNEL_ID=. You can get this ID by right clicking the channel in discord and selecting Copy ID. Make sure Developer Mode is on by going to Settings → Appearance → Advanced → Developer Mode → ON. Make sure the bot has permission to post in this channel.
  4. If you want to change the prefix (default "!"), you can change it in the ./src/monitor.js file (const PREFIX = '!';).

For starting and using the bot, see Usage.

Usage

The simplest method to monitor a site:

  1. Invite the bot to your Discord server by replacing 123456789012345678 in the following link with your bot's client id: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=123456789012345678&scope=bot&permissions=8.
  2. Open the command line in the cloned repository folder by opening the cmd.bat file.
  3. Start the bot by typing npm start.
  4. In Discord (the bot should now be online), add a website with the !add <URL> command.
  5. Done! The added site is now being monitored.
    By default, the watch interval for every website is 5 minutes, but you can easily change this with the !interval command followed by the interval in minutes.

For all other options, see Commands.

Commands

!help

Show all the available commands.

Parameters
None.

Example
!help This will show all the available commands.

Output
help

!add <URL> "<CSS SELECTOR>"

Adds a website to the list.

Parameters
Required:
URL The URL of the site you want to track.

Optional:
"CSS SELECTOR" The part of the site you want to track. (By default the <head> of the site is tracked).
Make sure to use double quotation marks when using this parameter.
In Chrome, this can be obtained by right clicking the part of the site you want to track and selecting: Inspect. After this you see the element highlighted in the developer view. You can right click on the element and select Copy → Copy selector.

Example
!add https://google.com/ This tracks changes on https://google.com/.
Note that some sites, including Google.com have dynamic elements (like ads) that cause a change every time its checked. To make sure this is filtered out, use the css selector parameter.

!add https://example.com/ "body > div > h1" This tracks changes in header 1 of the site https://example.com/.

Output
add

!remove <NUMBER>

Removes a website from the list.

Parameters
Required:
NUMBER The number of the site you want to remove. Use !list to see the number of the site(s).

Example
!remove 1 This removes the first site in the list (!list).

Output
remove

!list

Shows the list of websites being watched.

Parameters
None.

Example
!list This shows the list of websites being watched.

Output
list

!update

Manually updates the sites that are being watched.

Parameters
None.

Example
!update This manually updates the sites that are being watched.
If a site is updated, it will push the standard update message to the default update channel.

Output
update

!interval <MINUTES>

Set the interval/refresh rate of the watcher. Default 5 minutes.

Parameters
MINUTES The interval in minutes (minimum of 1, maximum of 60).

Example
!interval 10 Sets the interval to 10 minutes.

Output
interval

!start

Start the watcher with the specified interval (default ON with interval of 5 minutes).
This uses cron.

Parameters
None.

Example
!start This starts the watcher with the specified interval.

Output
start

!stop

Stops the watcher from automatically checking the tracked websites. Watcher can be resumed with !start.

Parameters
None.

Example
!stop This stops the watcher from automatically checking the tracked websites.

Output
stop

!status

Checks if the site watcher is running.

Parameters
None.

Example
!status This checks if the site watcher is running.

Output
When running:
statusOn

When off:
statusOff

Contribute

Im currently not updating the bot with new features, however I'll try to fix bugs that are reported. If you'd like you can add new features or fix bugs by forking the repository and creating a pull request.

Features I want to implement at some point:

  • Multi-server support
  • Configuration via Discord, not via config file
  • Docker image support
  • More options for setting interval (seconds/hours/days etc.)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details