Online Automated Tasks: 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 Yahoo! Pipes plus IFTTT 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 emails 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 emails when they change
• Connect to Adioso, HipChat, Basecamp, Growl, FTP, IMAP, Jabber, JIRA, MQTT, nextbus, Pushbullet, Pushover, RSS, Bash, Slack, StubHub, translation APIs, Twilio, Twitter, Wunderground, and Weibo, to name a few.
• Send digest emails 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.”

Local Installation

If you just want to play around, you can simply fork the repository, then perform the following steps:

• Run git remote add upstream https://github.com/cantino/huginn.git to add the main repository as a remote for your fork.
• Copy .env.example to .env (cp .env.example .env) and edit .env, at least updating the APP_SECRET_TOKEN variable.
• Run bundle to install dependencies
• Run bundle exec rake db:create, bundle exec rake db:migrate, and then bundle exec rake db:seed to create a development MySQL database with some example Agents.
• Run bundle exec foreman start, visit http://localhost:3000/, and login with the username of admin and the password of password.
• Setup some Agents!
• Read the wiki for usage examples and to get started making new Agents.
• Periodically run git fetch upstream and then git checkout master && git merge upstream/master to merge in the newest version of Huginn.

Note: By default, emails are intercepted in the development Rails environment, which is what you just setup. You can view them at http://localhost:3000/letter_opener. If you’d like to send real emails via SMTP when playing with Huginn locally, set SEND_EMAIL_IN_DEVELOPMENT to true in your .env file.

If you need more detailed instructions, see the Novice setup guide .

Manual installation on any server

Source && Download