cschneid/huginn

Huginn is a tool for building automated agents that monitor the web and take actions on your behalf. Think of it as a personal automation assistant that watches for things you care about and then does something about it, whether that's sending you an email, posting a message to Slack, or triggering another automated step. The way it works is you set up "agents", small configured tasks, that each do one thing, like watch a website for changes, track a keyword on Twitter, or check the weather. These agents pass information to each other in a chain. One agent might detect that the word "machine learning" is suddenly spiking on Twitter, then hand that event off to another agent that sends you an SMS. You can connect dozens of these agents together to build fairly complex workflows, all running on your own server so you control your data. Someone might use this to get an email when it's going to rain tomorrow, receive an alert when a specific term starts trending on Twitter, watch for price drops on flights or shopping sites, or scrape a website and get notified when something changes. You could even set up a multi-step workflow that asks Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to find and rate funny cat photos, then captions them, then posts the best one to your blog. It connects to services like Twitter, Slack, Twilio, RSS feeds, and many others. What stands out is that this is designed to be self-hosted, meaning you run it on your own infrastructure rather than relying on a third-party service like IFTTT or Zapier. The tradeoff is that you need some technical comfort to set it up, there's a database to configure and environment variables to manage, but the benefit is full control over your data and workflows. The project is open source under the MIT license and actively seeking community contributions.