What is Kibitzr?
Kibitzr is an open-source web automation and scraping tool written in Python. It allows users to create lightweight scrapers that fetch content from web pages on a regular schedule. Kibitzr scrapers can extract text, numbers, images, JSON, and other content from HTML pages.
Some common uses of Kibitzr include:
- Price monitoring - Track prices on ecommerce sites and get notified when they drop below a threshold.
- Notification of news and blog updates - Scrape article headlines and summaries from news sites and blogs.
- Uptime monitoring - Check if a website or API is up and running and get alerted if it goes down.
- Stock tracking - Extract stock prices for watchlists and portfolios.
- Weather updates - Scrape weather data and forecasts.
Kibitzr runs the user-defined scrapers on a cron-like schedule. It can send notifications through email, Slack, Pushover, Telegram, and other services when the scraped content changes or conditions are met. Scrapers are defined in simple YAML configuration files.
Kibitzr is designed to be lightweight, approachable for non-programmers, and suitable for everyday automation tasks. It handles sessions, pagination, ratelimits, and common scraping challenges out of the box. Kibitzr is written in Python and works on Linux, Windows, and macOS.