open source downloads
Ever need to watch a specific content page on a Web site for changes? Maybe it's a storefront
that needs rebooting, or your homepage that you want to ensure doesn't change without
your knowledge. The Web Watch Daemon is a very simple perl script that monitors any
page on the Web for a specific content string (the keyphrase). If it finds that
keyphrase missing from the page, then it will: (1) send an alert to an email address
you specify and/or (2) log the date and time of the failure.
Download
- Download webwatch.pl now (version 1.0)
(Change the '.txt' extension to '.pl' after the download to run)
Requirements:
Requires the LWP and HTTP perl modules (find them here).
Instructions:
Change the variables at the top of the script as noted in the inline instructions,
especially the watch_url and keyphrase.
Run this on a server that has Internet connectivity as a cron job, every
X minutes you want to check on your server. Sample crontab line:
05 * * * * perl /home/user/johnsmith/webwatch.pl
This line would run the script every hour at :05. If your
watch page is very important to your site,
you might run it every minute or every 5 minutes.
Please note: You can run this script on your Web server.
But for more robust applications, you should consider
running it on a Web server external to your network.
This allows the script to test not only for content
changes in the target page, but also network connectivity.
