This time, let’s explore the process of deploying changedetection.io as a Docker instance on a Proxmox home server.

What’s changedetection.io

changedetection.io is a simple and free open source website change detection, website watcher, restock monitor and notification service.
It can detect website content changes and perform meaningful actions - trigger notifications via Discord, Email, Slack, Telegram, API calls and many more. We want to be able to check changes also on webpages that uses JavaScript to fill-in the content, so we need to install a WebDriver as well.

Installation steps

1. Ensure you have a Proxmox home server set up and running
2. Use the Proxmox main shell to create an Alpine Docker LXC using this awesome script from tteck. Customize the installation and set 4GB disk space.
3. In the shell of the newly created container, run the following Docker command to run Chrome WebDriver:

docker run -d \
  --name selenium \
  --restart always \
  -p 4444:4444 \
  --shm-size="2g" \
  selenium/standalone-chrome-debug:3.141.59

4. In the shell of the newly created container, run the following Docker command to run changedetection.io:

docker run -d \
  --name changedetectionio \
  --restart always \
  --link selenium \
  -p 80:5000 \
  -e WEBDRIVER_URL="http://selenium:4444/wd/hub" \
  -v /docker/changedetectionio/datastore:/datastore \
  dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

4. Once the containers are up and running, you can access the changedetection.io web interface by navigating to http://<your-container-ip> in your web browser.
5. You are all set!

Note: WEBDRIVER_URL is using selenium in the path which is the name of the container running the WebDriver. This works because Docker creates a network between containers.

I suggest you to read the changedetection.io wiki to explore all the features of changedetection.io and to learn how to setup notifications on your own instance!

Enjoy your own changedetection.io instance! 🚀