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Introduction

The script in this repo monitors certain pages for the disappearance of certain text. Useful as a warrant canary cat, or some such.

Periodically invoke this via cron job. Upon detecting that an expected text snippet on a page & xpath deviates from an expected string, it will send a notification email.

Only when that occurs will it send an email. It'll periodically "forget" that it already notified you, just to let you know again -currently every 12 hours.

Installation

Create and activate a virtual Python 3 environment. For example-

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ . .venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Email credentials

This script currently relies upon having a Gmail app password for a Gmail account.

This is not ideal, as it means the Gmail app password will at some point be in plaintext during program execution.

I am working on a better way of doing this, where the Gmail app password is only encrypted at rest, and temporarily held decrypted in memory.

Therefore, you probably need to set up your gmail account for password-based access- https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

And you might need to enable this- https://realpython.com/python-send-email/#option-1-setting-up-a-gmail-account-for-development

Via text: email-to-SMS

If you want a text instead of/in addition to email, there are options for (mainly North American) phone services- free email-to-SMS exchange. Generally it's @somespecialdomain.com. Details: https://resources.voyant.com/en/articles/3107728-sending-emails-to-sms-or-mms

Execution

This script currently expects as first and only parameter the name of a config module, relative to the repo root. This is not very sophisticated, but it works for now.

Ideally, run cp config.py my_config.py and make all further edits to my_config.py.

Execute this script, in shell or via cron, as-

$ ./monitor_pages my_config

Once the script discovers a missing expected text, it sends an email about it to every address in TARGET_EMAILS.

Nota bene

Make a PR if you fix something. While this project is in use, it has not been tested extensively. Just a casual project, so expect some breakage to occur. Do not rely on it for monitoring production systems! Use at your own risk.