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+---
+title: "An Introduction to Huginn"
+date: 2024-05-23T00:00:00-05:00
+---
+I've been playing around a lot with [Huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn),
+which is a service that allows you to run "agents" for automation. It is similar
+to IFTTT.
+
+A lot of people see Huginn, and think it's cool, but don't know what to do with
+it. I didn't really either when I first heard of the project a few years ago.
+Hopefully you can get some ideas from this blog.
+
+I have [previously written about my "On This Day" software](https://marks.kitchen/blog/on_this_day/), which was a webserver
+I handcrafted. It ran a bunch of scripts to pull in data from various sources,
+and would create a daily digest of the items. Since I put this together fairly
+quickly several years ago, it runs usually without issue. But it's annoying to
+extend, and annoying to debug. I wanted to try to migrate the functionaility to
+huginn.
+
+Huginn has a bit of a learning curve. At first, I was having a hard time
+understanding the agent configuration options, and I couldn't even figure out
+how to use the HTTP request agent (called the "Website Agent"). With some light
+reading of the source code, I figured everything out. Currently, my "On This
+Day" scenario features 14 agents.
+
+- 7 "source" agents. Most of these are the "Website agents" which scrape some
+    data from the web, and parse the information I want from it. Several of
+    these are for comics, and they simply output the image source for a comic
+    image. One of the agents is a JavaScript agent, which runs a script I wrote
+    that generates a different result based on the date.
+
+- 5 formatting agents, which take in random JSON input, and normalize it. Each
+    source has a different input, but the outputs all just have a "message" and
+    a "type".
+
+- 1 digest agent, which takes in the normalized JSON, and combines it into one
+    HTML template. This listens for events over the course of a day, and then
+    when scheduled, it outputs the result of the templating.
+
+- 1 "data output" agent, which basically just means an RSS feed output. For
+    every new input, this adds an item to the feed.
+
+So far, this solution works really well. It's really easy to add new things. A
+few of the odd data sources from "On This Day" use JavaScript to fill in
+functionality gaps. For my journal data entry, which gets entries from historic
+journals, I ended up making my own API service. I finished most of this API in
+an evening, and adding it into huginn was really simple.
+
+For fun, I also added a "reblog" feed. I connected an Webhook agent to my RSS
+reader, Miniflux. I can "save" stories in Miniflux, and their links will get
+added to a daily list of "reblogged" items. I used a manual agent as well so
+that I can add links that don't originate from Miniflux (i.e. if I just find
+something elsewhere on the web). You can follow [this feed
+here](https://huginn.marks.kitchen/users/1/web_requests/23/reblogs.xml).
+
+I also have been using huginn for my personal tracking stuff. I previously had a
+bunch of cronjobs running on a raspberry pi. It collected data from my
+Airgradient arduino, and used a weather API. Some of this I've moved fully to
+Huginn, which will massively simplify all of the configuration.
+
+One benefit of having all of this is huginn is that it is much easier to set it
+all up again on a new server. As much as possible, everything is together in one
+place, rather than spread around in cronjobs on various nodes. I've been putting
+everything in Docker and exposing it via Traefik. It's very simple to set this
+all up.
+
+One downside of Huginn is that it's been hogging a lot of memory on my VPS. This
+isn't a huge deal, as I was already using a very minimal server. Additionally,
+as I mentioned before, it does take some time to figure out everything. I'm
+still not 100% sure of all of the settings, but functionally I was able to get a
+lot out with minimal tinkering. I also was dissapointed in the Docker setup,
+which doesn't have as much documentation for as I expected.
+
+Overall, I really enjoy Huginn! It's taken a lot of the scripts I've written
+over the last few years, and simplies their deployment and configuration. It's
+so much easier to update them, and I can do things I never before attempted.