14 ms·

Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online

270 points by vghaisas 5y ago

sidpatil 5y ago
Not to be confused with Hugin [1], the FOSS panoramic photo utility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software)
- toastal 5y ago
  I've used it exclusively for years, and it's produced some of the best results.
RyanShook 5y ago
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.
- zeppelin101 5y ago
  When I looked into it some time ago, what tripped me up was that it seemed that you needed to deploy it using Docker. Otherwise, you'd have quite an involving set up process: install Ruby, Rails, then a database. Then you'd probably want to figure out a set up to enable https + SSL. I had it running locally and was quite impressed by it, but wasn't ready to go the full Dockerized route on a VPS at that time. Maybe now I would.. just need to find the time. Personally, I think a project like Huginn would have more success if the code was in GoLang (easier to deploy) or Python (more popular language = people more willing to set it up) and used SqlLite for the backend. And if it had SSL/https baked in, out of the box. For comparison purposes, I distinctly remember how much I appreciated that Nextcloud had it baked in. So I ran NC very happily for quite a while and skipped out on Huginn.
- teaker 5y ago
  I use it daily at my law firm. It monitors online court dockets for many of my lawsuits and sends me an email when there is a new entry/order/filing. Incredibly useful.
- avh02 5y ago
  yes, i love the thing - i've been thinking of setting up klaxon from themarshallproject for the web diff/watching stuff i have - but still haven't looked in to it deeply (and not sure i like their ready-to-go deployment without flexibility) Examples of what i do with huginn: 1) twitter watching for peaks in activity in keywords around my home country (this one is hard, football interferes with it) 2) pulling in data from an API and storing it (where i jury rig a grafana dashboard to read from a view over the huginn data) 3) stuff that sends me push notifications on certain events (a bit of a rube goldberg machine, but: homeassistant zigbee device action is to hit a webhook on huginn, that webhook sends a push notification through huginn + alexa notifier event) 4) I have a zigbee panic button outside the house (again, attached to home assistant) in case someone is locked out without a phone and without keys that will then hit a webhook on huginn that will call the other adults of the house with a message 5) keep an eye on the job pages of a few companies i was interested in, filter out for roles with keywords in the title, and email me the details. 6) I'm waiting for certain products to become available, i have huginn watching those pages and sends me an email if it becomes available (if the manufacturer doesn't have a 'let me know when available' function) - this is unfortunately quite custom for each site, but do have a common chain afterwards 7) there's an english language news site that doesn't have rss or any form of notification, so i scrape their headline ticker and send myself push notifications It's not necessarily as flexible as i'd like - but it gets enough of the job done often enough, for anything else i can feed in webhooks from custom scripts, etc. If you get used to thinking in huginn, you will also be able to remove a lot of duplicated work and create common chains/funnels for events, that way you'd only need to add in one new agent at the top of a chain and you've already done the rest of the work. edit: formatting
bmgxyz 5y ago
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. 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. Curious to know if others have found use cases that are low-maintenance and high-value.
- chrbr 5y ago
  I agree, I've never quite been able to figure out anything useful over alternatives. Like the usual "send me an SMS when the weather will be rainy" example - I use a highly customizable weather app that gives me more power to send me stuff like that without having to fiddle with a new system. This system's integration with Mechanical Turk could be interesting, but I'm too dumb right now to figure out some cool things I could do with it.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  I have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter. Similarly startups I want to know if they’ve stagnated or gotten funding. I would like to get earnings calls emails for some companies I like. I want to get a ping if the forex rate changes for some combos, or if gold price drops by some percent. I and family have many bank accounts and it’s a real thing that you need to keep an eye on the finances of your banks here (one goes down every few years). I will like to have news alerts on all the small towns my family is in so I know if something big happened anywhere. I think it’s definitely a mindset to think of everything you do or read every day and think if you can offload it to someone or something else. Once you switch that knob on you notice so much every day.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > I have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter. That sounds so far away from how I deal with "frenemies" (I just ignore them) that I have to ask: What do you get out of reading what they are up to on Twitter and LinkedIn?
Havoc 5y ago
I toyed a bit with this and also node red. Ultimately decided the learning overhead and yet another system running isn’t worth it. Instead building python code > dockerize > deploy CI pipeline. Slightly more general purpose tool I think though at loss of the drag and drop low code convenience
- rektide 5y ago
  I definitely think there needs to be some kind of sea change for this kind of tool to really have an impact. I fret that there's not enough middle-brow interest in tech & computers for even the best designed, most capable user-scripter (like Huginn or Node-RED) to become truly high impact. Developers tend to find a lot of value add versus deploying whatever industrial ops practices they know. So whose left to support & nurture these interesting vanguards, these more comprehensively-built & user-focused computing environments? And reciprocally getting started with a project like this is somewhat daunting for the newcomer, while at the same time they're bombarded by far more options & places to get started in computing than they can handle. I think most folk kind of swear off involvement, don't have a way to casually check out a couple random computing attempts easily, dabble & sample. Computing rebuffs interest, alas. I still believe in change. The dis-interest in computing is obvious & clear to me today, because most computing is back on shitty mainframes (cloud) in places we can't see or poke at (apps, cloud). Trying to better merge the developers back into the folk would help a lot. But real wins are needed broadly to tell users they're wanted on the other side, to make exploration fun and cool again.
  - Havoc 5y ago
    We had a roll out of a (good) low code finance tool at work and frankly the uptake was breathtakingly underwhelming. The average user is substantially less computer literate than most techies assume. The jump from navigating menus in excel to the logical flow of code just isn’t there, regardless of graphic or not. I don’t mean that in a “users are stupid” sense but rather that the missing piece can’t really be filled in by low or no code. It’s the thinking pattern that’s missing entirely, not an issue with how that pattern is expressed. Personally I don’t think it’ll change. If anything it is getting worse. Alexa and friends make people think there is some sort of magic that can be tapped into. Mirror opposite of how a programmer would reason through code flow.
caseysoftware 5y ago
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. 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. I may come to a different conclusion if I build an armored combat suit. Or for a more realistic and fun story, check out Daniel Suarez's Daemon. It's great.
foolinaround 5y ago
some of the comments below talk to more on the cost-benefits of running/maintaining a huginn server, and the dearth of usecases? What is one is able to get a hosted Huginn server?
freeqaz 5y ago
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 https://refinery.io https://refinery.io (docs have screenshots) 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). 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). Thanks for the reminder about this!
- nyellin 5y ago
  I'm CEO of robusta.dev (an automations tool for Kubernetes) and this has been our experience too. People don't want the ability to write their own automations - they want something that just works out of the box. Very early on we realized this based on feedback and pivoted to focusing on out of the box alert insights (powered by automations we wrote) and not write your own automations. I don't know what the equivalent is for the web.
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    > People don't want the ability to write their own automations I don't think that is true. People do want their own automations, but only when necessary. And as always, it should be as effortless as possible. That's the main fail where most of those tools struggle. > they want something that just works out of the box. Why not both? Personally, I want something gives me everything for the common tasks and services, but also has room to let me grow into the direction I need to go. This does not mean I want to build everything myself, or even start at zero. But between zero customizing, and doing everything yourself, there should be a common ground that allows me find my sweet spot. And there are many good tools which do feed into this desires and are working well.
    - nyellin 5y ago
tectonic 5y ago
Well, it’s fun to see Huginn on HN! I’m the original author, but now it’s maintained by other excellent folks. 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 (https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com).
- detaro 5y ago
  Do you have a writeup, or know of writeups by others, that go into detail of your use? Always a bit hard to imagine given universal tools like this.
  - tectonic 5y ago
    I have a few on my blog, https://blog.andrewcantino.com https://blog.andrewcantino.com, but nothing comprehensive. I mostly use it to monitor Reddit/HN/Twitter/various blogs for certain keywords, and also to keep an eye on local things that I want to know about (weather, events, emergencies, etc.).
    - monkeydust 5y ago
      Is it able to say login to my LinkedIn account and scan posts for keywords and alert me on matching posts?
      - theshrike79 5y ago
        LinkedIn is as sketchy as Facebook on automated logins. They want to keep their data exclusive to them (and to people who pay for API access).
      - capableweb 5y ago
        It's trivial to write your own agents, and use other 3rd party gems in those agents. For fetching data from LinkedIn, checkout https://github.com/mdesjardins/linkedin-v2 https://github.com/mdesjardins/linkedin-v2 (YMMV)
- 5y ago
vorpalhex 5y ago
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). 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.
agucova 5y ago
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. [1]: https://n8n.io/ https://n8n.io/
- visarga 5y ago
  Looks like a web version of RPA.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  N8N is awesome for some tasks, but infuriating for others. The time I've spent trying to filter seen data from a source is just mind-boggling. It would've been a lot faster to do the whole thing myself. And I'm not alone in this. Pretty much every task that updates on a timer needs to exclude things it has already seen - and this is a herculean cryptic task in N8N.
unclekev 5y ago
I love Huginn. I implemented it where I used to work and it ended up being the glue between a lot of services. 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. Very powerful and versatile product.
preya2k 5y ago
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. Still, Huginn is a very nice tool.
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610 - Dec 2019 (143 comments - beaten only by crows that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12) Huginn can now run for free on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772 - July 2014 (2 comments) Tell HN: There's two separate products on the front page, huginn and hugin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281 - April 2014 (3 comments) Huginn: Like Yahoo Pipes plus IFTTT on your server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605 - April 2014 (94 comments) Show HN: Standing Queries about the World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316 - April 2014 (14 comments) Huginn – Know when the world changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676 - March 2014 (1 comment) Introductory Screencast for Huginn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501 - March 2013 (1 comment) Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651 - March 2013 (70 comments)
- plibither8 5y ago
  > beaten only by crows that day Very funny, since "Huginn" and "Mininn" were a mythological pair of ravens [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn
  - aasasd 5y ago
    There's also a ‘Munin’ software, of course: a server monitoring program. It was pretty neat around ten years ago, dunno how it compares now.
    - hnarn 5y ago
      We run it in production. It works well but RRD backed graphs are a pain to work with so we’re currently looking at netdata instead to see how it compares.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
iamwpj 5y ago
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. 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.
_theory_ 5y ago
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. 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.

270 points by vghaisas 5y ago

Not to be confused with Hugin [1], the FOSS panoramic photo utility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software)

toastal 5y ago
I've used it exclusively for years, and it's produced some of the best results.

RyanShook 5y ago

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.

zeppelin101 5y ago
When I looked into it some time ago, what tripped me up was that it seemed that you needed to deploy it using Docker. Otherwise, you'd have quite an involving set up process: install Ruby, Rails, then a database. Then you'd probably want to figure out a set up to enable https + SSL. I had it running locally and was quite impressed by it, but wasn't ready to go the full Dockerized route on a VPS at that time. Maybe now I would.. just need to find the time. Personally, I think a project like Huginn would have more success if the code was in GoLang (easier to deploy) or Python (more popular language = people more willing to set it up) and used SqlLite for the backend. And if it had SSL/https baked in, out of the box. For comparison purposes, I distinctly remember how much I appreciated that Nextcloud had it baked in. So I ran NC very happily for quite a while and skipped out on Huginn.
teaker 5y ago
I use it daily at my law firm. It monitors online court dockets for many of my lawsuits and sends me an email when there is a new entry/order/filing. Incredibly useful.
avh02 5y ago
yes, i love the thing - i've been thinking of setting up klaxon from themarshallproject for the web diff/watching stuff i have - but still haven't looked in to it deeply (and not sure i like their ready-to-go deployment without flexibility) Examples of what i do with huginn: 1) twitter watching for peaks in activity in keywords around my home country (this one is hard, football interferes with it) 2) pulling in data from an API and storing it (where i jury rig a grafana dashboard to read from a view over the huginn data) 3) stuff that sends me push notifications on certain events (a bit of a rube goldberg machine, but: homeassistant zigbee device action is to hit a webhook on huginn, that webhook sends a push notification through huginn + alexa notifier event) 4) I have a zigbee panic button outside the house (again, attached to home assistant) in case someone is locked out without a phone and without keys that will then hit a webhook on huginn that will call the other adults of the house with a message 5) keep an eye on the job pages of a few companies i was interested in, filter out for roles with keywords in the title, and email me the details. 6) I'm waiting for certain products to become available, i have huginn watching those pages and sends me an email if it becomes available (if the manufacturer doesn't have a 'let me know when available' function) - this is unfortunately quite custom for each site, but do have a common chain afterwards 7) there's an english language news site that doesn't have rss or any form of notification, so i scrape their headline ticker and send myself push notifications It's not necessarily as flexible as i'd like - but it gets enough of the job done often enough, for anything else i can feed in webhooks from custom scripts, etc. If you get used to thinking in huginn, you will also be able to remove a lot of duplicated work and create common chains/funnels for events, that way you'd only need to add in one new agent at the top of a chain and you've already done the rest of the work. edit: formatting

bmgxyz 5y ago

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. 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. Curious to know if others have found use cases that are low-maintenance and high-value.

chrbr 5y ago
I agree, I've never quite been able to figure out anything useful over alternatives. Like the usual "send me an SMS when the weather will be rainy" example - I use a highly customizable weather app that gives me more power to send me stuff like that without having to fiddle with a new system. This system's integration with Mechanical Turk could be interesting, but I'm too dumb right now to figure out some cool things I could do with it.
ramraj07 5y ago
I have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter. Similarly startups I want to know if they’ve stagnated or gotten funding. I would like to get earnings calls emails for some companies I like. I want to get a ping if the forex rate changes for some combos, or if gold price drops by some percent. I and family have many bank accounts and it’s a real thing that you need to keep an eye on the finances of your banks here (one goes down every few years). I will like to have news alerts on all the small towns my family is in so I know if something big happened anywhere. I think it’s definitely a mindset to think of everything you do or read every day and think if you can offload it to someone or something else. Once you switch that knob on you notice so much every day.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > I have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter. That sounds so far away from how I deal with "frenemies" (I just ignore them) that I have to ask: What do you get out of reading what they are up to on Twitter and LinkedIn?

Havoc 5y ago

I toyed a bit with this and also node red. Ultimately decided the learning overhead and yet another system running isn’t worth it. Instead building python code > dockerize > deploy CI pipeline. Slightly more general purpose tool I think though at loss of the drag and drop low code convenience

rektide 5y ago
I definitely think there needs to be some kind of sea change for this kind of tool to really have an impact. I fret that there's not enough middle-brow interest in tech & computers for even the best designed, most capable user-scripter (like Huginn or Node-RED) to become truly high impact. Developers tend to find a lot of value add versus deploying whatever industrial ops practices they know. So whose left to support & nurture these interesting vanguards, these more comprehensively-built & user-focused computing environments? And reciprocally getting started with a project like this is somewhat daunting for the newcomer, while at the same time they're bombarded by far more options & places to get started in computing than they can handle. I think most folk kind of swear off involvement, don't have a way to casually check out a couple random computing attempts easily, dabble & sample. Computing rebuffs interest, alas. I still believe in change. The dis-interest in computing is obvious & clear to me today, because most computing is back on shitty mainframes (cloud) in places we can't see or poke at (apps, cloud). Trying to better merge the developers back into the folk would help a lot. But real wins are needed broadly to tell users they're wanted on the other side, to make exploration fun and cool again.
- Havoc 5y ago
  We had a roll out of a (good) low code finance tool at work and frankly the uptake was breathtakingly underwhelming. The average user is substantially less computer literate than most techies assume. The jump from navigating menus in excel to the logical flow of code just isn’t there, regardless of graphic or not. I don’t mean that in a “users are stupid” sense but rather that the missing piece can’t really be filled in by low or no code. It’s the thinking pattern that’s missing entirely, not an issue with how that pattern is expressed. Personally I don’t think it’ll change. If anything it is getting worse. Alexa and friends make people think there is some sort of magic that can be tapped into. Mirror opposite of how a programmer would reason through code flow.

caseysoftware 5y ago

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. 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. I may come to a different conclusion if I build an armored combat suit. Or for a more realistic and fun story, check out Daniel Suarez's Daemon. It's great.

foolinaround 5y ago

some of the comments below talk to more on the cost-benefits of running/maintaining a huginn server, and the dearth of usecases? What is one is able to get a hosted Huginn server?

freeqaz 5y ago

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 https://refinery.io https://refinery.io (docs have screenshots) 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). 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). Thanks for the reminder about this!

nyellin 5y ago
I'm CEO of robusta.dev (an automations tool for Kubernetes) and this has been our experience too. People don't want the ability to write their own automations - they want something that just works out of the box. Very early on we realized this based on feedback and pivoted to focusing on out of the box alert insights (powered by automations we wrote) and not write your own automations. I don't know what the equivalent is for the web.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  > People don't want the ability to write their own automations I don't think that is true. People do want their own automations, but only when necessary. And as always, it should be as effortless as possible. That's the main fail where most of those tools struggle. > they want something that just works out of the box. Why not both? Personally, I want something gives me everything for the common tasks and services, but also has room to let me grow into the direction I need to go. This does not mean I want to build everything myself, or even start at zero. But between zero customizing, and doing everything yourself, there should be a common ground that allows me find my sweet spot. And there are many good tools which do feed into this desires and are working well.
  - nyellin 5y ago

tectonic 5y ago

Well, it’s fun to see Huginn on HN! I’m the original author, but now it’s maintained by other excellent folks. 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 (https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com).

detaro 5y ago
Do you have a writeup, or know of writeups by others, that go into detail of your use? Always a bit hard to imagine given universal tools like this.
- tectonic 5y ago
  I have a few on my blog, https://blog.andrewcantino.com https://blog.andrewcantino.com, but nothing comprehensive. I mostly use it to monitor Reddit/HN/Twitter/various blogs for certain keywords, and also to keep an eye on local things that I want to know about (weather, events, emergencies, etc.).
  - monkeydust 5y ago
    Is it able to say login to my LinkedIn account and scan posts for keywords and alert me on matching posts?
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      LinkedIn is as sketchy as Facebook on automated logins. They want to keep their data exclusive to them (and to people who pay for API access).
    - capableweb 5y ago
      It's trivial to write your own agents, and use other 3rd party gems in those agents. For fetching data from LinkedIn, checkout https://github.com/mdesjardins/linkedin-v2 https://github.com/mdesjardins/linkedin-v2 (YMMV)
5y ago

vorpalhex 5y ago

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). 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.

agucova 5y ago

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. [1]: https://n8n.io/ https://n8n.io/

visarga 5y ago
Looks like a web version of RPA.
theshrike79 5y ago
N8N is awesome for some tasks, but infuriating for others. The time I've spent trying to filter seen data from a source is just mind-boggling. It would've been a lot faster to do the whole thing myself. And I'm not alone in this. Pretty much every task that updates on a timer needs to exclude things it has already seen - and this is a herculean cryptic task in N8N.

unclekev 5y ago

I love Huginn. I implemented it where I used to work and it ended up being the glue between a lot of services. 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. Very powerful and versatile product.

preya2k 5y ago

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. Still, Huginn is a very nice tool.

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610 - Dec 2019 (143 comments - beaten only by crows that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12) Huginn can now run for free on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772 - July 2014 (2 comments) Tell HN: There's two separate products on the front page, huginn and hugin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281 - April 2014 (3 comments) Huginn: Like Yahoo Pipes plus IFTTT on your server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605 - April 2014 (94 comments) Show HN: Standing Queries about the World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316 - April 2014 (14 comments) Huginn – Know when the world changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676 - March 2014 (1 comment) Introductory Screencast for Huginn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501 - March 2013 (1 comment) Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651 - March 2013 (70 comments)

plibither8 5y ago
> beaten only by crows that day Very funny, since "Huginn" and "Mininn" were a mythological pair of ravens [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn
- aasasd 5y ago
  There's also a ‘Munin’ software, of course: a server monitoring program. It was pretty neat around ten years ago, dunno how it compares now.
  - hnarn 5y ago
    We run it in production. It works well but RRD backed graphs are a pain to work with so we’re currently looking at netdata instead to see how it compares.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

iamwpj 5y ago

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. 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.

_theory_ 5y ago

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. 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.