It's really as simple as this:
- un tar the archive,
- alter the config file (url.list) - add your mail addresses and the URLs would want to watch
- run the script (./websec) - it will grab initial copies of your pages
- run it again later & it will indicate any changes that have occurred
This instant gratification is seductive - running from cron is a little more complicated & this is obviously software which you will want to run on a scheduled basis most of the time - monitoring pages & alerting you to any changes automatically. Aside from the fact that 'cron doesn't run as you' (which I always seem to have forgotten about when I need to setup a new job) there's a couple of things you need to do for websec in particular:
Let's set it up
As in the man page - websec's data dir is actually ~/.websec/ - something not immediately obvious after the ease of running interactively like above. The essential components:
- url.list - the config file
- ignore.list - configurable stuff to ignore & not count as a change
- archive - containing copied of the watched pages which are fetched & stored so they can be diff'ed
- need to live in in the above data directory (even if you don't have any ignore data - it needs to be there). So a recipe for for the setup is:
- configure your websec
- run it once so it can store initial state (in the archive directory)
- copy all the files/dirs noted above into ~/.websec/
- make sure that the directory which contains the scripts (websec & webdiff) is in your PATH
reate your scheduled job. In cron, something like:
59 * * * * /full/path/to/websec > /dev/null 2>&1
or, if you want the full output for testing etc:
09 * * * * /full/path/to/websec 2>&1 | mail -s "websec run" your@email.dot.dot
Although you still need to full path to the command in there, it's smart enough to find webdiff (if in the same directory) & also to find the data dir (in this sense, cron IS 'running as you' :) )
