You can run the app as a Docker container (using docker-compose), a Pip install, or from the source directly. The advantage of using docker-compose is that you can easily enable the "Chrome WebDriver", however for most sites the built-in "Plain requests" will work (fetches only the HTML and does not run the sites Javascript)

1. Download and install Python

https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/ always use the official latest stable release (tested with 3.10), this installer comes with "Pip" the package manager, which will make the rest easy, it will automatically install all the related utility packages.

Choose the "Windows Installer" package

Be sure the "associate .py files with Python" option is selected

Last tested with Python 3.12.4

2. Install setuptools using the pip3 command

Open a command box (cmd command from the start-bar) and then pip3 install setuptools (this is required as of Python 3.12, as distutils is no longer shipped with Python 3.12, it has been depreciated since Python 3.10)

3. Install changedetection.io using the pip3 command

Open a command box (cmd command from the start-bar) and then pip3 install changedetection.io

4. Start changedetection.io from the command line

Simply run changedetection.py

5. Visit your installation

Now visit https://127.0.0.1:5000

You should see the user-interface

You can specify other commands like -d (different storage path for the data) and -p different network port

If the pages are using JavaScript you will need to drive a chrome browser via changedetection.io - See here https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io/wiki/Fetching-pages-with-WebDriver#microsoft-windows---running-chromedriver-natively-without-docker

Simply run pip3 install -U changedetection.io