What does WatchMe actually do? It comes down to helping you to create configurations to check web pages or other system content for changes. The checks are done with cron jobs, and the changes tracked with version control.

Watcher

A watcher comes down to a GitHub repository (stored in the WatchMe home directory, discussed under Environment that tracks changes for one or more items of interest. You can create as many watchers as you like, and you can choose to push to a service like GitHub (or not). The watcher has a particular configuration file, one called watcher.cfg, that will tell the software how to run the watcher. What does this mean? It means you can push your watcher configuration and items to GitHub, and someone else can install the software and reproduce your watching. Cool!

Watcher Types

So far, we’ve talked about looking for changes in “pages,” or websites. This is the default watcher type, however there are other kinds of tasks that a watcher might run. When you create a new watcher, you can specify the type with the --type argument.

Decorators

A watchme decorator is a monitor that can be used to run some task over one of your python functions. For example, the psutils watcher type has a decorator to record resource information about a running process (your function) while it’s running.

Where should I go next?

Read about the Environment or go back to the Quick Start