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Huginn: Like Yahoo Pipes plus IFTTT on your server

524 points| ColinWright | 12 years ago |github.com

94 comments

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[+] hyp0|12 years ago|reply
I always liked the Yahoo Pipes concept... but it didn' seem take off... and I personally found it too limited for everything I tried to do with it. Perhaps it's just another case of the old "visual programming language" is harder than it looks.

I hope Huginn does better. I like their copywriting "You always know who has your data. You do."

[+] shavenwarthog2|12 years ago|reply
Agreed. I did a multipart Yahoo Pipes project to find my current apartment. It grabbed info from two sites, tossed out the uninteresting ones, filtered it a bit, then texted me if a new apartment in my price/location range appeared.

Very useful, if a little awkward. The Huginn project sounds like a great alternative!

[+] albertsun|12 years ago|reply
The best part of Huginn is being able to self-host and write any arbitrary agents you want.
[+] dfc|12 years ago|reply
I don't know, the documentation is excellent. That is certainly one of the best READMEs I have ever seen. The organization of the setup sction of the README is superb. The author of the README clearly thought about the needs of new users as well as seasoned veterans. More projects need to adopt this general format:

  # Getting Started

  ## Quick Start

  If you are unsure of our project and just want to play around, you can
  get things set up quickly by:

  1.  Clone this repository and…
  2.  Do something
  3.  Do the other thing

  If you need more detailed instructions, have no fear. We are not going
  to look down on you if you are not an expert. We took the time to write
  a setup guide for newcomers: [Novice setup guide][novice-setup-guide].
  Everybody has to start somewhere.

  ## Real Start

  Follow these instructions if you wish to deploy your own version or
  contribute back to the project. There is nothing we hate more than
  README’s that ignore all of the practical concerns related to setting up
  a long term installation. Follow these steps and it will be easy for you
  to keep up with updates to the project and still retain the all tweaks
  you made to suit your idiosyncrasies.

  ## Odds and Ends

  ### Optional features

  Not everybody needs a XYZ plugin or wants to share their every action
  with PQR. You can enable these features by…

  ### Rare Corner cases

  In certain rare circumstances you made need to prevent X or implement Y.

  Prevent X by…

  If you need to implement Y…
[+] platz|12 years ago|reply
I wish the agents could language-agnostic though.
[+] malanj|12 years ago|reply
This looks really awesome for managing an office. We're currently automating things using Google scripts and other custom glue to do things like order food, get feedback on lunch and mail people weekly digests activities. Sounds like this could be a great solution for this.
[+] anentropic|12 years ago|reply
weekly digestion activites...?
[+] yukichan|12 years ago|reply
Zapier is also good with lots of integrations, but it's a little pricey. Yet if you calculate what your time is worth and include the amount spent on making this work plus customizations, it's probably less. Depends on if Zapier can do what you want.
[+] c0nsumer|12 years ago|reply
This is a really frustrating name. Hugin is already used for panoramic photo stitching software: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

This just has another N bolted on to the end and does something completely different.

[+] fasteddie31003|12 years ago|reply
I am working on a similar project called Taskflow.io that is aimed at more backend business oriented tasks. It can do similar things through an interface flowchart editors where you make the actual flowchart that gets executed. I would still consider it a public beta. I would love your feedback.
[+] zorbo|12 years ago|reply
Will this be provided As-A-Service, or will it be a downloadable product that can be deployed in-house? This is exactly what I have been looking for for a while, but there's absolutely zero chance we're going to send any of our business information to a remote service.
[+] johnobrien1010|12 years ago|reply
Crowded space... We're trying to go the same thing for business intelligence applications with a product we're launching called flowreports.co...
[+] alxndr|12 years ago|reply
Anyone know why this project encourages using a private fork to do contributing development?

> "Make a public fork of Huginn. [...] Make a private, empty GitHub repository called huginn-private. Duplicate your public fork into your new private repository[. ...] Checkout your new private repository. Add your Huginn public fork as a remote to your new private repository[. ...] When you want to contribute patches, do a remote push from your private repository to your public fork of the relevant commits, then make a pull request to this repository."

[+] tectonic|12 years ago|reply
Just to let you keep any private changes private. Perhaps it's not the best recommendation.
[+] thomasfl|12 years ago|reply
Will this run on a standard heroku stack? The wiki says it will run on OpenShift and CloudFoundry. https://github.com/cantino/huginn/wiki
[+] tectonic|12 years ago|reply
It will run, but the default Procfile spins up 4 processes, so Heroku might be expensive. If someone wants to figure out how to get everything to run easily in one process, that would make free Heroku hosting possible. I run it on a small VPS.
[+] jayxie|12 years ago|reply
Exciting stuff, it would be amazing to build an AI layer on top of this that mines your browsing habits (depending on your paranoia settings) and automatically generates agents based on your interests.
[+] platz|12 years ago|reply
Excluding the UI, I wonder if storm is a more robust, if more complex, option to do the same types of things: http://storm.incubator.apache.org/
[+] nl|12 years ago|reply
Storm is a framework for coordinating computation. It's not really designed to "perform automated tasks for you online" - although of course you could make it do that.

If you want to run a machine learning algorithm on 100 machines then Storm is what you want. Want a service to check the weather for your location? Huginn looks good.

[+] feralmoan|12 years ago|reply
Storm doesn't naturally support dynamic topologies and is rather resource hungry, which needs a bit advanced planning. I was looking @ Storm for my own pipelining product (bip.io) very early on and shied away as too high an opportunity cost for self-hosting users/devs to be bothered with. On a Rasberry Pi for example, forget about it. Without being able to create dynamic graphs it otherwise just ends up being a simple message bus (anti-pattern).
[+] egonschiele|12 years ago|reply
You are right that Storm is certainly more robust for large amounts of data. But Storm just provides underlying infrastructure. Huginn builds on top of something like that to add different agents for twitter, weather etc. So afaict, Huginn is an app built on top of something like Storm.
[+] weavie|12 years ago|reply
This sounds like an excellent project to make use of my raspberry pi.
[+] okhan|12 years ago|reply
I was just building exactly this, only worse. Looks really great.
[+] zwentz|12 years ago|reply
This would be very cool for automating parts of AWS. Inclement weather coming? Or an earthquake? Start spooling up servers in another region.
[+] kzahel|12 years ago|reply
Does this have a companion android/iOS app to upload location data? I really like the idea of self hosting something like this.
[+] crawfordcomeaux|12 years ago|reply
I extended a Find My iDevice API lib about a year ago with the intention of creating a Huginn agent for exactly this, but life got in the way. I also wanted to add a geofencing agent, too.

Unsure if there's a better lib out there, but here's what I worked on...warning: needs lots of love, eg. tests: https://github.com/rickyc/find-my-ios-device

[+] platz|12 years ago|reply
You could probably get all your data from google as well since it's stored on their servers, without having to upload from your phone
[+] fujipadam|12 years ago|reply
This is awesome but is there a tool like this in php? I am looking for a easy visual scraper