netstiff (formerly known as webdiff) is a powerful Web and FTP site update checker.

netstiff supports a variety of different methods to check for updates, e.g., check for differences of the file, of the text after HTML rendering, of the size, the date, MD5 sum, or check for a regular expression).

Although there is no graphical user interface, netstiff is easy to use.

You can configure it interactively or by directly changing the config file. Without any given arguments, netstiff will run its interactive configuration tool if no configuration file exists, otherwise it will check your sites for updates and print the changes in a diff-like manner.

• Ruby standard distribution (net::http, net::ftp, uri, pstore)
• optional:
  • GNU Readline for Ruby
  • OpenSSL for Ruby

netstiff is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 3). See LICENSE for more information.

The main menu of the interactive configuration tool:

The diff-view of FTP changes:

netstiff comes with an elaborate manual page that should help in case something is not self-explanatory.

For further questions, feel free to contact me directly.