Configuration

The global configuration for urlwatch contains basic settings for the generic behavior of urlwatch as well as the Reporters. You can edit it with:

urlwatch --edit-config

Display

In addition to always reporting changes (which is the whole point of urlwatch), urlwatch by default reports newly-added (new) pages and errors (error). You can change this behavior in the display section of the configuration:

display:
  new: true
  error: true
  unchanged: false

If you set unchanged to true, urlwatch will always report all pages that are checked but have not changed.

Filter changes are not applied for unchanged

Due to the way the filtered output is stored, unchanged will always report the old contents with the filters at the time of retrieval, meaning that any changes you do to the filter of a job will not be visible in the unchanged report. When the page changes, the new filter will be applied.

For this reason, unchanged cannot be used to test filters, you should use the --test-filter command line option to apply your current filter to the current page contents.

Reporters

Configuration of reporters is described in Reporters.

Here is an example configuration that reports on standard output in color, as well as HTML e-mail using sendmail:

report:
  text:
    details: true
    footer: true
    line_length: 75
  html:
    diff: unified
  email:
    enabled: true
    method: sendmail
    sendmail:
        path: /usr/sbin/sendmail
    from: 'urlwatch@example.org'
    to: 'you@example.org'
    html: true
    subject: '{count} changes: {jobs}'
  stdout:
    color: true
    enabled: true

Any reporter-specific configuration must be below the report key in the configuration.

Configuration settings like text, html and markdown will apply to all reporters that derive from that reporter (for example, the stdout reporter uses text, while the email reporter with html: true set uses html).

Job Defaults

If you want to change some settings for all your jobs, edit the job_defaults section in your config file:

job_defaults:
  all:
    diff_tool: wdiff
  url:
    ignore_connection_errors: true

The above config file sets all jobs to use wdiff as diff tool, and all url jobs to ignore connection errors.

The possible sub-keys to job_defaults are:

• all: Applies to all your jobs, independent of its kind
• shell: Applies only to shell jobs (with key command)
• url: Applies only to url jobs (with key url)
• browser: Applies only to browser jobs (with key navigate)

See Jobs about the different job kinds and what the possible keys are.