What is Huginn?
Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn’s Agents create and consume events, propagating them along a directed graph. Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server. You always know who has your data. You do.
Here are some of the things that you can do with Huginn:
- Track the weather and get an email when it’s going to rain (or snow) tomorrow (“Don’t forget your umbrella!”)
- List terms that you care about and receive email when their occurrence on Twitter changes. (For example, want to know when something interesting has happened in the world of Machine Learning? Huginn will watch the term “machine learning” on Twitter and tell you when there is a spike in discussion.)
- Watch for air travel or shopping deals
- Follow your project names on Twitter and get updates when people mention them
- Scrape websites and receive email when they change
- Connect to Adioso, HipChat, FTP, IMAP, Jabber, JIRA, MQTT, nextbus, Pushbullet, Pushover, RSS, Bash, Slack, StubHub, translation APIs, Twilio, Twitter, and Weibo, to name a few.
- Send digest email with things that you care about at specific times during the day
- Track counts of high frequency events and send an SMS within moments when they spike, such as the term “san francisco emergency”
- Send and receive WebHooks
- Run custom JavaScript or CoffeeScript functions
- Track your location over time
- Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the “HumanTaskAgent”). For example: “Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog.”
Join us in our Gitter room to discuss the project.
Examples
Please checkout the Huginn Introductory Screencast!
And now, some example screenshots. Below them are instructions to get you started.
Getting Started
Docker
The quickest and easiest way to check out Huginn is to use the official Docker image. Have a look at the documentation.
Develop
All agents have specs! And there’s also acceptance tests that simulate running Huginn in a headless browser.
- Install PhantomJS 2.1.1 or greater:
- Using Node Package Manager:
npm install phantomjs
- Using Homebrew on OSX
brew install phantomjs
- Using Node Package Manager:
- Run all specs with
bundle exec rspec
- Run a specific spec with
bundle exec rspec path/to/specific/test_spec.rb
. - Read more about rspec for rails here.
Deployment
Please see the Huginn Wiki for detailed deployment strategies for different providers.
Heroku
Try Huginn on Heroku: (Takes a few minutes to setup. Read the documentation while you are waiting and be sure to click ‘View it’ after launch!)
Huginn launches on the free version of Heroku with significant limitations. For non-experimental use, we strongly recommend Heroku’s 1GB paid plan or our Docker container.
OpenShift
Optional Setup
Setup for private development
See private development instructions on the wiki.
Enable the WeatherAgent
In order to use the WeatherAgent you need an Weather Data API key from Pirate Weather. Sign up for one and then change the value of api_key: your-key
in your seeded WeatherAgent.
Disable SSL
We assume your deployment will run over SSL. This is a very good idea! However, if you wish to turn this off, you’ll probably need to edit config/initializers/devise.rb
and modify the line containing config.rememberable_options = { :secure => true }
. You will also need to edit config/environments/production.rb
and modify the value of config.force_ssl
.