I’m a huge fan of Home Assistant and use it to automate most of my devices at my home, and for that matter, I follow a few people on Twitter and YouTube that share valuable information on it!
One of those is BeardedTinker channel on YouTube, as he provides particularly good step-by-step explanations in his videos - if you are interested on the topic, I do recommend following his YouTube channel!
A few weeks ago he published a video on Smart Home Service monitoring with Home Assistant, where he showed how we can check that a website is working correctly by using curl on the webpage address and then checking for the 200 OK status return code.
I wanted to improve on that by checking a webpage for changes and then creating automations on that!
There are a few ways to achieve this, I will be discussing two of them!
Using the ETag header
First, here is a quick explanation on what the ETag header is (more here):
The ETag HTTP response header is an identifier for a specific version of a resource. It lets caches be more efficient and save bandwidth, as a web server does not need to resend a full response if the content has not changed.
As all we want is the webpage headers, we can use a HEAD request instead of the GET, so here is how the whole thing will work:
sensor:
- platform: command_line
name: webpage_monitor
command: >-
python3 -c "import requests; response = requests.head('https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.html'); print(response.headers.get('ETag'))"
scan_interval: 10800
On the above example, we have a sensor called webpage_monitor that will execute a python command to perform a HEAD request on the Zigbee2MQTT Devices webpage, and return the ETag header value.
Now all we need is an automation that will trigger when the state (value) of this sensor changes:
automation:
- alias: Show notification when webpage_monitor changes
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: sensor.webpage_monitor
action:
- service: persistent_notification.create
data:
message: 'Page changed!'
Using the page content
Not all webpages have an ETag header, and for those cases (or when the ETag somehow changes without the content actually changing), we can instead create a hash of the page content and use that in our automation!
Here is an example with the Home Assistant homepage:
sensor:
- platform: command_line
name: webpage_monitor
command: >-
python3 -c "import hashlib, requests; response = requests.get('https://www.home-assistant.io/'); print(hashlib.sha256(response.content).hexdigest())"
scan_interval: 10800
The above will calculate a unique hash of the content of the page and store that in the sensor.
As before, all we need then is to create an automation that will run when the sensor state changes!
