Reviewing changes between schedule updates

When an agency updates their schedule and releases an updated GTFS file, it can be useful to review what has changed when generating HTML timetables. There are two ways to review what has changed:

Use git

Use git to version control the output of GTFS-to-HTML. Make a git repository for this purpose and check in a set of timetable HTML files. Then, when generating updated timetables overwrite the old timetables and review the changes using your favorite git tool, such as Github Desktop.

Use diff2html

diff2html is a command line tool to easily compare two folders of html timetables.

First generate two folders of GTFS-to-HTML output to compare. To make it easy to see what has changed, set the beautify option to true in the config file for both sets of output.

Then, install diff2html:

npm install -g diff2html-cli

Use the diff command and pipe the output to diff2html to get a nicely formatted list of the differences between two folders of html files.

diff -bur html/folder1 html/folder2 | diff2html -i stdin