Huginn is an Open Source system designed to create agents that monitor and act on your behalf. It functions as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier running on your own server, ensuring that you always know who has your data.

The principal functionalities of Huginn are centered around automated task performance using software "Agents" that create and consume events:

Core Automation and Monitoring

• Web Monitoring and Scraping: Huginn agents can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Specifically, they can scrape websites and receive email when they change.

• Event Tracking and Notification: Agents can track the weather and send email alerts (e.g., when it is going to rain). They can also track counts of high frequency events (like "san francisco emergency") and send an SMS moments when they spike.

• Social Media Monitoring: Huginn can watch for changes in the occurrence of terms on Twitter and send an email when the discussion volume changes. It can also follow your project names on Twitter and provide updates when people mention them.

• Deal Watching: It can watch for air travel or shopping deals.

• Digest Creation: Users can send digest emails with collected information at specific times.

• Location Tracking: Agents can track your location over time.

Integration and Customization

• Extensive Connectivity: Huginn can connect to and integrate with numerous external services and protocols, including Adioso, HipChat, FTP, IMAP, Jabber, JIRA, MQTT, nextbus, Pushbullet, Pushover, RSS, Bash, Slack, StubHub, translation APIs, Twilio, Twitter, and Weibo, among others.

• WebHooks: It can send and receive WebHooks.

• Scripting and Logic: Huginn allows users to run custom JavaScript or CoffeeScript functions.

• Complex Workflows: It can create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows using the "HumanTaskAgent".

• Agent Development: Complex and specific agents can be written as external gems and added to the Huginn installation.

Deployment and Technical Features

• Self-Hosted and Secure: Huginn is designed to run on your own server.

• Installation Options: The easiest way to deploy is using the official Docker image. It can also be deployed locally (requiring MySQL or PostgreSQL).

• Cloud Deployment: Detailed deployment strategies are available for providers such as Heroku (on a paid subscription plan) and OpenShift Online (using specific JSON templates).

• Technology Stack: The core repository is primarily built using Ruby (89.0%), with contributions in HTML (7.6%) and JavaScript (2.2%).

• Licensing: Huginn is provided under the MIT License.