Well, it’s fun to see Huginn on HN! I’m the original author, but now it’s maintained by other excellent folks.<p>I still use Huginn almost daily. It’s kind of my exocortex at this point, and the secret sauce for staying abreast of space industry news for Orbital Index (<a href="https://orbitalindex.com" rel="nofollow">https://orbitalindex.com</a>).
I found this a few years ago and was super intrigued JARVIS-like potential and dove into it. There's a STEEP learning curve but once you get it figured out a couple times, it's really powerful and you can do a lot.<p>My problem is that the things I could do.. didn't particularly seem useful. Sure, knowing the weather is useful but I can get a pretty good idea on my own or checking the times I need to know more. Knowing about trends up/down in my stock is only useful if I'm going to act. Now that I have solar, I can see some more use cases but most are also around curiosity vs knowing when to take action.<p>I may come to a different conclusion if I build an armored combat suit.<p>Or for a more realistic and fun story, check out Daniel Suarez's Daemon. It's great.
Past related threads:<p><i>Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610</a> - Dec 2019 (143 comments - beaten only by crows that day: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12</a>)<p><i>Huginn can now run for free on Heroku</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772</a> - July 2014 (2 comments)<p><i>Tell HN: There's two separate products on the front page, huginn and hugin</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281</a> - April 2014 (3 comments)<p><i>Huginn: Like Yahoo Pipes plus IFTTT on your server</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605</a> - April 2014 (94 comments)<p><i>Show HN: Standing Queries about the World</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316</a> - April 2014 (14 comments)<p><i>Huginn – Know when the world changes</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676</a> - March 2014 (1 comment)<p><i>Introductory Screencast for Huginn</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501</a> - March 2013 (1 comment)<p><i>Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651</a> - March 2013 (70 comments)
I ran a startup that I shut down a few years ago that was designed to do something very similar to this. It is dead now but the site is up at <a href="https://refinery.io" rel="nofollow">https://refinery.io</a> (docs have screenshots)<p>What I figured out is that... it's really hard to get this type of thing right. The more generic something is, the less useful it is. Zapier is a pretty amazing tool but it's also incredibly difficult to write all of their integrations. This tool suffers from a lot of the same problems (integrations are where the value is).<p>It's cool to see others talking about this though. It makes me want to Open Source the core tech we used to build Refinery (including the half-baked version that uses Temporal for long-running action sequences).<p>Thanks for the reminder about this!
I tried using this a year or two ago—seemed like a really cool idea, and I still think it is—but I couldn't find an actually useful application for it in my life.<p>Not saying there aren't plenty of neat applications out there, but once the initial "that's cool" feeling wore off, I wasn't sure how to actually get some value out of the system. For me, it felt like a time sink.<p>Curious to know if others have found use cases that are low-maintenance and high-value.
Not to be confused with Hugin [1], the FOSS panoramic photo utility.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software)</a>
An alternative to this (more similar to node red, actually) is n8n [1], which is pretty cool, but as others have said here, I never found a good application for this.<p>[1]: <a href="https://n8n.io/" rel="nofollow">https://n8n.io/</a>
I toyed a bit with this and also node red.<p>Ultimately decided the learning overhead and yet another system running isn’t worth it. Instead building python code > dockerize > deploy CI pipeline.<p>Slightly more general purpose tool I think though at loss of the drag and drop low code convenience
I love Huginn.<p>I implemented it where I used to work and it ended up being the glue between a lot of services.<p>Started using it when our Zapier bill started approaching $4k per month, and it ended up replacing most of the functionality that we were using Zapier for.<p>Very powerful and versatile product.
I’ve used Huginn for a long time to do web scraping. But I’ve completely switched to n8n and I haven’t looked back.<p>Still, Huginn is a very nice tool.
I looked into this, but ended up going with PagerDuty's Rundeck. It's a similar idea, but with a less public and more internal focus. I see it as one step beyond an active monitoring service (because of the scheduling services). We use it to aggregate scripts that rely on several disparate data sources. It's easy to create one-liners or short dependencies that are highly re-usable to and then use those to gather the right data for more complex scripts.<p>This service runs as an interim before we can migrate to full containers and rely on their orchestration services. Sometimes I imagine SysOps as layers, this is a Layer 7, where as K8s is all of Layers 3-5.
Is anyone here an active user of Huginn? Basically roll your own Zapier. I’ve always been interested in it but never taken the time to get it set up and configured.
I ended up going with node-red over huginn since it met my needs better, but having a "glue" service like this is useful. Whether it's building an api for sites that lack one (eg, alert me when this clinical trial actually gets results) or handling exceptions (when X is down, toggle Y switch).<p>Sure, you can write code and deploy it, etc to do this. The glue service just presents a low code approach to most simple things.
When I first looked at Huginn, it wouldn't run on ARM (raspberry pi). I eventually just went with Python3, Cronjobs, and an app called Pushover (push notifications). No visual niceties, but it works rather well for my purposes.<p>I have scripts for:
- checking exchange rates
- checking the price of wine or other products
- sending me the latest messages that interesting people on HN post
- etc.
some of the comments below talk to more on the cost-benefits of running/maintaining a huginn server, and the dearth of usecases?<p>What is one is able to get a hosted Huginn server?