Dependencies

Optional packages

The use of certain features require additional Python packages to work. These optional packages are installed with pip by appending to the name webchanges the name of the feature (from the table below) inside square brackets, like this:

pip install --upgrade webchanges[use_browser]
pip install --upgrade webchanges[use_browser,redis]

Feature	Python package(s) installed
use_browser (in a url job)	Playwright psutil Note: Google Chrome (if not present) will be auto-installed at first run
Filters
beautify filter	beautifulsoup4 jsbeautifier [1] cssbeautifier [2]
bs4 method of the html2text filter	beautifulsoup4
html5lib parser for the bs4 method of the html2text filter	html5lib
ical2text filter	vobject
imagediff differ	Pillow
jq filter	jq Only available for Linux and macOS (Windows installation is incomplete)
ocr filter	pytesseract Note: requires Tesseract to be separately installed [3] Pillow
pdf2text filter	pdftotext Note: you will also have to separately install OS-specific dependencies [4]
pypdf filter	pypdf Note: for PDF files that are not password-protected (otherwise use pypfd_crytpo)
pypdf_crypto	pypdf[crypto] For the pypdf filter when using the password sub-directive to extract text from encrypted PDF files.
Differs
deepdiff differ	deepdiff
deepdiff_xml differ for XML	deepdiff xmltodict
Reporters
matrix reporter	matrix_client
pushbullet reporter	pushbullet.py
pushover reporter	chump
xmpp reporter	aioxmpp
Others
redis database	redis
requests (to use http_client: requests in a job)	requests
safe_password keyring storage	keyring
all	All the optional packages listed above Note: you will also have to separately install OS-specific dependencies [3] [4]

Footnotes

[1]

Optional, to beautify content of <script> tags.

[2]

Optional, to beautify content of <style> tags.

[3] (1,2)

See Tesseract information here.

[4] (1,2)

See pdftotext information here.

Installed packages

These Python packages are installed automatically by pip when installing webchanges:

• colorama (only in Windows installations);

• cssselect (required by lxml.cssselect);

• h2;

• html2text;

• httpx;

• lxml;

• markdown2;

• msgpack;

• platformdirs;

• PyYAML;

• tzdata (only in Windows installations).