How to get regular updates of Loksewa vacancies, exam dates, and results

If you are preparing for Loksewa, you already know the problem. The notice you needed was published on a Sunday, you opened the site on Wednesday, and by then half the application window is gone. Refreshing psc.gov.np five times a day is not a strategy.

So instead of checking the site, let the site check itself and mail you when something changes. This post sets up a self-hosted changedetection.io instance on Rocky Linux 10, points it at the three PSC pages that actually matter, and tunes the filters so you only get pinged for real notices — not for every visitor counter and rotating banner on the page.

1. Prep the system

sudo dnf -y update
sudo dnf -y install dnf-plugins-core kernel-modules-extra
sudo reboot

kernel-modules-extra is the one that catches people out. Rocky Linux 10 minimal and cloud images don’t include it by default, and without it Docker fails to start because iptables can’t load the xt_addrtype module. Reboot so the running kernel matches the modules you just installed. After reboot, confirm:

modinfo xt_addrtype

2. Install Docker CE

Rocky 10 ships DNF 5, where the config-manager syntax changed. The bulletproof version that works either way:

sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/yum.repos.d/docker-ce.repo \
  https://download.docker.com/linux/rhel/docker-ce.repo

Note the /rhel/ path. A lot of guides still tell you to use the CentOS repo — that was a workaround from when Docker v28 had no RHEL 10 repository, and it’s no longer needed.

sudo dnf -y install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io \
  docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
sudo systemctl enable --now docker
docker version

3. Post-install

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Firewall for LAN access:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=5000/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=9443/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

4. Deploy changedetection + Chrome

mkdir -p ~/changedetection && cd ~/changedetection

Create the compose file, substituting your LAN IP in BASE_URL:

cat > docker-compose.yml << 'EOF'
services:
  changedetection:
    image: ghcr.io/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io:latest
    container_name: changedetection
    hostname: changedetection
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    volumes:
      - changedetection-data:/datastore
    environment:
      - PLAYWRIGHT_DRIVER_URL=ws://sockpuppetbrowser:3000
      - BASE_URL=http://192.168.1.100:5000
      - TZ=Asia/Kathmandu
      - FETCH_WORKERS=4
    depends_on:
      sockpuppetbrowser:
        condition: service_started

  sockpuppetbrowser:
    image: dgtlmoon/sockpuppetbrowser:latest
    container_name: sockpuppetbrowser
    hostname: sockpuppetbrowser
    restart: unless-stopped
    cap_add:
      - SYS_ADMIN
    environment:
      - SCREEN_WIDTH=1920
      - SCREEN_HEIGHT=1024
      - SCREEN_DEPTH=16
      - MAX_CONCURRENT_CHROME_PROCESSES=4

volumes:
  changedetection-data:
EOF

Three deliberate choices in there:

• sockpuppetbrowser has no published ports. Plenty of example compose files map 3000 or 5041 to the host. It doesn’t need to be — changedetection reaches it over the internal compose network by hostname. Exposing a remote-controllable Chrome on your LAN is a bad idea.
• cap_add: SYS_ADMIN is required for Chrome’s sandbox to work.
• BASE_URL is what gets embedded in notification links. Get it wrong and your alert emails will point at localhost.

Bring it up:

docker compose up -d
docker compose ps
docker compose logs -f changedetection

5. Turn the Chrome fetcher on

This is the step that trips up almost everyone, and it’s why you’ll find threads full of people whose Playwright setup “doesn’t work.” Setting PLAYWRIGHT_DRIVER_URL only makes the fetcher available — it doesn’t make it the default.

Open http://<LAN-IP>:5000, then:

• Settings → Fetching → set the default fetcher to the Chrome/Playwright option
• Or set it per-watch under the watch’s Request tab

6. The three PSC pages worth watching

Lok Sewa Aayog publishes different things on different category pages, and the one most people bookmark (the homepage) is the noisiest of the lot. For Computer Engineer and IT Officer aspirants applying through the sangathit (organised institutions — banks, NEA, NTC, and similar corporations) route, these three are the ones that matter:

What you get	URL
New vacancy announcements	https://psc.gov.np/category/sangathit-vacancies
Exam dates, centres, schedules	https://psc.gov.np/category/sangathit-examinations
Published results	https://psc.gov.np/category/sangathit-results

Add each one separately. From the changedetection dashboard, paste the URL into the Add a new change detection watch box and hit Watch. Do it three times, once per URL.

Give each watch a sensible title and tag while you’re at it — open the watch, go to the General tab, and set:

• Title: PSC — Sangathit Vacancies (and so on for the other two)
• Group / tag: loksewa — later you can filter the dashboard by this tag and, more usefully, attach one notification setting to the whole group instead of repeating it three times
• Recheck time: every 3 hours is plenty. PSC publishes during office hours, and hammering a government site every 60 seconds is both rude and a good way to get your IP throttled.

While you’re in the watch settings, confirm the Request tab is using the Chrome/Playwright fetcher. These pages render their notice tables through the theme’s JavaScript, and the plain HTTP fetcher gives you an inconsistent snapshot.

7. Filters: the one XPath that makes this usable

Here is what happens if you watch those URLs raw: you get a notification almost every single check. Not because a new notice was published, but because the page footer has a visitor counter, the sidebar has a rotating notice widget, and the nav has a Nepali date that changes daily. Signal drowns in noise, and within a week you start ignoring the mails — which defeats the entire purpose.

The fix is to tell changedetection to look at only the notice table. Open the watch → Filters & Triggers tab → the CSS/JSONPath/JQ/XPath Filters box, and put in:

//table//tbody/tr[position() <= 10]

Read it left to right:

• //table — find the table anywhere in the document, no matter how deeply the theme nests it in divs. This is why XPath beats a brittle CSS selector like div.content > div.row > table here; if PSC reshuffles its layout, //table survives it.
• //tbody/tr — take the body rows only. The <thead> row is skipped, so a header re-render never counts as a change.
• [position() <= 10] — and keep only the first ten rows.

That last bracket is the important part, and it’s doing two jobs.

First, it kills pagination noise. These category pages list dozens of old notices. Every time PSC adds one entry at the top, every row below shifts down a position, and an unfiltered diff reports the whole table as changed. By pinning the window to the top ten, a new notice pushes exactly one row off the bottom and the diff stays small and readable — you can see the actual new notice in the mail body instead of a wall of red and green.

Second, it keeps you looking at the newest entries only. PSC sorts newest first. Anything older than the top ten is not something you need an alert about; you either already applied or the deadline is gone.

Ten is a starting point, not a law. If a heavy publishing week means several notices land between two checks, bump it to position() <= 15. If you want to be alerted only for the single newest item, position() = 1 works too — just be aware that if two notices land inside one recheck interval, you’ll only ever see the later one.

Apply the same filter to all three watches. The vacancies, examinations, and results pages share the same table layout, so the same XPath works unchanged on all of them.

Wiring up notifications

Go to Settings → Notifications for a global default, or set it per-watch (or per-tag, which is why we tagged them loksewa) in the Notifications tab.

changedetection uses Apprise URLs, so the format is one line per destination:

tgram://<bot-token>/<chat-id>
discord://<webhook_id>/<webhook_token>

Telegram is honestly the better choice here — mail from a self-hosted box tends to land in spam, and a Telegram ping actually reaches your phone.

Set Notification Body.

{{watch_title}} changed

{{watch_url}}

{{diff}}

{{diff}} inlines the added and removed lines, which — thanks to the position() <= 10 filter — is usually just the one new row. That means you can read the notice title straight off your phone’s lock screen and decide whether to open the laptop.

Use Send test notification before you walk away. A silent notification pipeline is worse than no pipeline, because you’ll assume no mail means no vacancy.

Final check

Open one of the watches and hit Recheck. Then let it run a full day. What you want to see by the next morning is: three watches, all green, all with a “last checked” timestamp, and zero notifications. That’s the system working. The first mail you get should be a real notice.

Updating later:

cd ~/changedetection
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

One thing to watch: docker compose down leaves the named volume intact, but docker compose down -v destroys your entire watch history and config. Easy to type by reflex.