Huginn

Huginn is an open-source system for building agents that perform automated tasks online. Originally created by Andrew Cantino in 2013, it runs on your own server and is released under the MIT License. Its agents read the web, watch for events, and act on the user's behalf, with the README describing it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier.

What It Is

Huginn is a self-hosted automation platform built on Ruby. Agents create and consume events and pass them along a directed graph, so one agent's output can trigger another. The project positions self-hosting as a data-control benefit: you always know who has your data.

What Agents Can Do

The README lists example uses such as:

• Weather alerts by email.
• Watching Twitter terms for spikes in mentions.
• Scraping websites and emailing when they change.
• Watching for travel or shopping deals.
• Sending digest emails at set times.
• Sending and receiving WebHooks.
• Running custom JavaScript functions.
• Tracking your location over time.

It can connect to services including Slack, Twilio, RSS, IMAP, JIRA, MQTT, Pushover and others. An external HumanTaskAgent supports Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows.

Setup and Deployment

The quickest route is the official Docker image. Alternatives include a local install with MySQL or PostgreSQL (bundle, rake db tasks, foreman), Heroku, OpenShift templates, or manual installation on any server. The WeatherAgent needs a Pirate Weather API key. For shared instances, the docs recommend routing outbound requests through an egress proxy so agents cannot reach internal services.

Extending Huginn

Agents can be written as external gems and added through the ADDITIONAL_GEMS environment variable. The project encourages complex or specific agents to be gems, while general-purpose agents go in the core repository. Agents have specs, and acceptance tests run in a headless browser.