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
  empty-diff: true

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

The empty-diff settings control what happens if a page is changed, but due to e.g. a diff_filter the diff is reduced to the empty string. If set to true, urlwatch will report an (empty) change. If set to false, the change will not be included in the report.

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

“Reporters” are the modules that deliver notifications through their respective medium when they are enabled through the configuration file.

Reporter-specific options are described in Reporters.

In addition to the reporter-specific options, all reporters support these options:

• enabled: [bool] Activate the reporter. (default: False)

• separate: [bool] Send a report for each job rather than a combined report for all jobs. (default: False)

Reporters are implemented in a hierarchy, such that these common configuration settings will apply to all descendent reporters:

html
text
├───stdout
├───email
├───ifttt
├───webservice
│   ├───pushover
│   └───pushbullet
├───mailgun
├───telegram
├───slack
│   └───mattermost
├───discord
├───xmpp
├───prowl
└───shell
markdown
└───matrix

Note

Setting the email reporter’s html option to true will cause it to inherit from the html configuration.

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
    separate: true
  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.

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.