page-poller is a simple Node.js script that polls a website and alerts when there's a change. It uses a headless browser (via Puppeteer) to render the page. The advantage is that it will catch changes in client-rendered content, such as with Single Page Apps that use JavaScript to render content.
| Static pages | Pages rendered with JS | Pages behind login |
|---|---|---|
| ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ |
This can be used for any website by setting the --url option. It strips csrf tokens and all script tags, which sometimes contain tokens that are supposed to change on every refresh. I may add functionality to select certain parts of a page to check for changes, but for now it just checks whole pages.
I originally built this to poll PAX sites to alert me when badges were available, and the --pax option is still there for that purpose.
When there's a change, the script will stop polling, print a diff to the command line, send a desktop notification, and immediately open the page in your default browser.
Requires Node.js to run.
$ git clone git@github.com:timmywil/page-poller.git
$ cd page-poller
$ npm install$ ./page-poller.js -u https://timmywil.com # Leave open in a terminal and let it run. Ctrl-c to quit.
$ ./page-poller.js --pax east --url, -u URL to poll [string]
--poll, -p Poll interval in milliseconds. Minimum is 500.
[number] [default: 5000]
--pax PAX site to poll
[choices: "west", "east", "aus", "south", "unplugged"]
--continual, -c Continue polling even when there is a change [boolean]
--help Show help
--version Show version number