Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online

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:&#x2F;&#x2F;orbitalindex.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orbitalindex.com</a>).

I found this a few years ago and was super intrigued JARVIS-like potential and dove into it. There&#x27;s a STEEP learning curve but once you get it figured out a couple times, it&#x27;s really powerful and you can do a lot.<p>My problem is that the things I could do.. didn&#x27;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&#x2F;down in my stock is only useful if I&#x27;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&#x27;s Daemon. It&#x27;s great.

Past related threads:<p><i>Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21772610" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21772610</a> - Dec 2019 (143 comments - beaten only by crows that day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;front?day=2019-12-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;front?day=2019-12-12</a>)<p><i>Huginn can now run for free on Heroku</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8090772" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8090772</a> - July 2014 (2 comments)<p><i>Tell HN: There&#x27;s two separate products on the front page, huginn and hugin</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7589281" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7589281</a> - April 2014 (3 comments)<p><i>Huginn: Like Yahoo Pipes plus IFTTT on your server</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7585605" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7585605</a> - April 2014 (94 comments)<p><i>Show HN: Standing Queries about the World</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7582316" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7582316</a> - April 2014 (14 comments)<p><i>Huginn – Know when the world changes</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7431676" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7431676</a> - March 2014 (1 comment)<p><i>Introductory Screencast for Huginn</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5387501" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5387501</a> - March 2013 (1 comment)<p><i>Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT &#x2F; Yahoo Pipes</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5377651" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;refinery.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;refinery.io</a> (docs have screenshots)<p>What I figured out is that... it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t find an actually useful application for it in my life.<p>Not saying there aren&#x27;t plenty of neat applications out there, but once the initial &quot;that&#x27;s cool&quot; feeling wore off, I wasn&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hugin_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;n8n.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;n8n.io&#x2F;</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 &gt; dockerize &gt; 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&#x27;s Rundeck. It&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;glue&quot; service like this is useful. Whether it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;maintaining a huginn server, and the dearth of usecases?<p>What is one is able to get a hosted Huginn server?