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Huginn: An Open-Source, Self-Hosted IFTTT
Automate everything
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As developers, we don’t have the time or patience for routine tasks. We like to get things done, and any tools that can help us automate are high on our radar.
Enter Huginn, a workflow-automation server similar to Zapier or IFTTT — but open source. With Huginn, you can automate tasks, such as watching for air travel deals, continually watching for certain topics on Twitter, or scanning for sensitive data in your code.
Recently a post about Huginn hit the top of Hacker News. This piqued my interest. I wanted to see why it’s so popular, what it’s all about, and what it’s being used for.
How Huginn Started
I reached out to Huginn’s creator, Andrew Cantino, to ask him why he started it.
“I started the project in 2013 to scratch my own itch — I wanted to scrape some websites to know when they changed (web comics, movie trailers, local weather forecasts, Craigslist sales, eBay, etc.), and I wanted to be able to automate simple reactions to those changes. I’d been interested in personal automation for a while, and Huginn was initially a quick project I built over the Christmas holidays that year.”
However, that simple Christmas-holiday project quickly grew.