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dgtlmoon / changedetection.io

The best and simplest free open source web page change detection, website watcher, restock monitor and notification service. Restock Monitor, change detection. Designed for simplicity - Simply monitor which websites had a text change for free. Free Open source web page change detection, Website defacement monitoring, Price change notification
https://changedetection.io
Apache License 2.0
15.85k stars 884 forks source link

[feature] Detecting changes using ETags #2383

Open jarble opened 1 month ago

jarble commented 1 month ago

Does changedetection.io watch for changes in HTTP response headers, such as the ETag, Last-Modified, or Content-Length headers?

These headers should not change unless a page's content has changed, so it should be possible to detect changes on a page using these headers without downloading the page's content again.

dgtlmoon commented 1 month ago

Hi - no - it is designed to watch for changes in content , for example, when a paragraph in the page changes and you just want that changed paragraph in your notification

accessing etag headers still needs to take into account anti-robot blockers, which pretty much require chrome, and so in chrome you cant just request the headers more or less, or maybe you can? unsure if puppeteer/playwright will let us do that

but for sure this belongs to a bigger thing where we want to include the Headers of the reply as part of the change detection (maybe a new plugin?)