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[Tut] Receive Automated Email Notification on Website Update - Printable Version

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[Tut] Receive Automated Email Notification on Website Update - xSicKxBot - 12-23-2022

Receive Automated Email Notification on Website Update

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[b]Project Description[/b]

This project is a demonstration of a live project on Upwork. We will replicate the entire process using a different URL. We will check for changes in the website after every hour and if there are changes to its content, we will immediately send an automated email to notify that the website has changes in it. This means, whenever the content in the website gets modified it means that there will be changes in it and that is what we capture and then send the notification that there have been changes made to the website.

Here’s a quick look at the original project listed on Upwork –

[Image: image-300.png]

The project can be roughly divided into two major sections –
  • Detecting if changes have occurred in the website.

  • Sending an automated email to notify that there have been changes made to a website.

Step 1: Detecting Changes in the Website

We will be following these steps to detect if there were changes in the website or not –
  • Read the given URL.

  • Hash the entire website.

  • Ensure that you wait for a few seconds and then check the next hash value returned.

  • If the next hash is different from the previous hash, then that means there have been changes made to the website.

[b]1.1 Import the Necessary Libraries[/b]

We will need the help of certain libraries that will aid us in accomplishing our task. Hence, go ahead and import these libraries into your script.

Code:
import time import hashlib from urllib.request import urlopen, Request import smtplib import ssl from email.message import EmailMessage
[b]1.2 Detect Changes in Website[/b]
  • Once you have imported the necessary libraries, set up the given URL (https://news.ycombinator.com/) to monitor and send a GET request.

  • Create the hash of the response received using
    Code:
    hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest()
    and store it in a variable
    Code:
    currentHash
    . This denotes the current hash value.

  • Now, use an infinite loop to keep checking the hash of the response received from the website and check the difference between the previous hash and the current hash to detect if any change has been made to the website or not. You can use a sleep time delay of 30 seconds or any duration as per the need. In case anything changes you can move on to step 2.

Code:
url = Request('https://news.ycombinator.com/', headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}) response = urlopen(url).read() currentHash = hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest() print("running") PrevVersion = "" time.sleep(10) while True: try: time.sleep(30) response = urlopen(url).read() newHash = hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest() if newHash == currentHash: continue else: print("something changed") response = urlopen(url).read() currentHash = hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest() time.sleep(30) continue except Exception as e: print(e)
[b]Step 2: Sending Automated Email Notification[/b]

As soon as a change is detected, you can send an automated email to the recipient.
  • Import the necessary libraries to send the email (already done above).

  • Set the email sender and receiver.

  • Set the subject body of the email.

  • Add SSL

  • Login and send the email.

Code:

Code:
# Sending Email Notification port = 465 # For SSL smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com" sender_email = "work.demo.test.email@gmail.com" # Enter your address receiver_email = "shubhamsayon@gmail.com" # Enter receiver address password = 'xxxxxxx' subject = 'Website Change Notification' message = """ Subject: Hi there! Changes have been applied to Website! """ em = EmailMessage() em['From'] = sender_email em['To'] = receiver_email em['Subject'] = subject em.set_content(message) context = ssl.create_default_context() with smtplib.SMTP_SSL(smtp_server, port, context=context) as server: server.login(sender_email, password) server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, em.as_string())

Caution: You might get an error while sending the email. In the past, we could connect to Gmail easily using Python just by turning on the “Less secure app access” option. But that option is no longer available. Instead, what we have to do now is turn on 2-step verification and then retrieve a 16-character password provided by Google that can be used to log in to Gmail using Python.

To learn more about this, refer to the following article here.

Putting It All Together

Well! We have actually solved the given problem. All that remains to be done is to join the pieces together. So, here’s how the final code looks:

Code:
import time import hashlib from urllib.request import urlopen, Request import smtplib import ssl from email.message import EmailMessage url = Request('https://news.ycombinator.com/', headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}) response = urlopen(url).read() currentHash = hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest() print("running") PrevVersion = "" time.sleep(10) while True: try: time.sleep(30) response = urlopen(url).read() newHash = hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest() if newHash == currentHash: continue else: print("something changed") response = urlopen(url).read() currentHash = hashlib.sha224(response).hexdigest() time.sleep(30) # Sending Email Notification port = 465 # For SSL smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com" sender_email = "work.demo.test.email@gmail.com" # Enter your address receiver_email = "shubhamsayon@gmail.com" # Enter receiver address password = 'xxxxxxxxx' subject = 'Website Change Notification' message = """ Subject: Hi there! Changes have been applied to Website! """ em = EmailMessage() em['From'] = sender_email em['To'] = receiver_email em['Subject'] = subject em.set_content(message) context = ssl.create_default_context() with smtplib.SMTP_SSL(smtp_server, port, context=context) as server: server.login(sender_email, password) server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, em.as_string()) continue except Exception as e: print(e)
Conclusion

Sending automated emails can be such a superpower, especially if you have to send daily emails of the same type while working. The added advantage of the technique that we learned in this article is how easily you can notify users about certain changes via emails. Not only did we learn how to send automated emails but we also saw how one could easily detect changes occurring in a website.

I hope this project added some value to your coding journey. Please subscribe and stay tuned for more interesting solutions and discussions in the future. Happy coding! [Image: 1f642.png]

Related Read: How to Send Emails in Python?