Trigger Happy: An opensource clone of IFTTT | Hacker News Reader

Trigger Happy: An opensource clone of IFTTT

trigger-happy.eu

334 pointsvmorgulis79 comments

Is there anyone relying on IFTTT (or Huginn, or this) for non-trivial things?

There was never any vital day-to-day things I could build with IFTTT: I could email myself the daily forecast or things like that, but it was never a killer app for me. Most of the popular recipes[1] I see on IFTTT seem like fun little annoyances that would ultimately get distracting.

If it's really crucial to how you work day-to-day, what are you doing with it?

[1]: https://ifttt.com/discover

I rely on it for something that is pretty simple: notification if it's going to rain tomorrow.

It doesn't rain enough where I live for me to be in the habit of checking, so having something sitting in the background that will remind me the ~5 times a year I care is really really helpful.

I ride a bike to work so it helps me prep my rain gear. My morning commute time doesn't take into account finding gear and getting it on :)

I use it for the exact same thing: I motorcycle in to work and need to make sure my rain gear is ready. But it only actually works about 25% of the time. It works so rarely that I haven't even remembered to turn it off.

Bummer. It works 99% for me but some ability to choose the percent chance threshold would help.

Same for me. I never check the weather and had too many times the situation after a morning commute by train to be totally unprepared to the destination weather. With that simple recipe never happened again.

I would love something like this to have a decent Waze applet. Yes I am too lazy to launch Waze before leaving home.

A while back I had a long design discussion about using IFTTT to do essentially what pagerduty is doing. Notification relays and routing: Feed an event into it, and based on urgency and tags broadcast it to the correct feeds (irc channels, slack, email sysadmins, etc). You could theoretically create groups of people you want to contact this way.

No more screwing around with bridging protocols and every single bot implementing their own library to connect to a billion different messaging protocols.

But yeah, I'm not passionate enough about the idea to do it. And IFTTT wouldn't have been enough.

Try Zapier for that.

I have tried it out for various things but the one I rely on most is "call and leave a message then get that message emailed to me" I ONLY use this feature for logging my work tasks and client visits throughout the day. Basically I always forget to record my time spent at various locations or when I do extra work outside of scheduled hours. I have ifttt as a contact in my phone named Bender. When I'm in my car going to/from client visits I can tell my phone "Call Bender" and I tell Bender what I'm up to, and anything I might want to note about times, mileage, etc. Hugely useful fallback for me so that at the end of the month I search my email for "voice memo" and I can process everything I haven't already captured. Especially when I have to run around putting out fires in multiple places I can easily forget exactly what I did and in what order.

Maybe you could try Moves (https://www.moves-app.com) to help with that? I use it to log when I arrive and leave my office and it could easily handle multiple clients/locations.

I can vouch for Moves, used it a lot before Facebook bought it. Similar to Google's location history.

That looks good, thanks for the info. I remember trying a bunch of geofences with ifttt to try and do something similar. It was a little hit and miss. Recently I switched to windows phone and that limits my app selection in a major way for stuff like this running in the background. Part of why I was OK with the switch was that my main use of ifttt doesn't need an app. I think I'll be back to an iPhone next year and moves might be the way to go.

I use Zapier/IFTTT to automate various aspects of my business (automatically shuffling emails between different lists, logging payed invoices into a spreadsheet, some basic expense tracking).

For personal use, I use it mainly to make sure I get an email about some high-priority sites I follow and to log my weight into a spreadsheet.

The Maker channel allows you to receive POST requests, and if you combine that with Dropbox you can use it to log things to a file on your Dropbox account.

I use IFTTT to email me every time a file is deleted from my Dropbox, after a nasty incident where several gigabytes of baby photos were silently deleted. Luckily I noticed soon enough to restore them.

I'm not sure why it happened or whether it could happen again, and Dropbox doesn't have a "this folder is write only" option, and I rarely delete things from Dropbox, so it's nice to have.

Why not just set the folder rights so that things can't be deleted?

If you have something that valuable, consider making regular backups of the things (stored on Dropbox) to another location (Zip and send to Amazon S3 monthly for example).

I wouldn't rely on just Dropbox even with the IFTTT check.

I find it best for set-and-forget integrations. Eg. back up all my instagram photos to google drive

I have heard of people using Huginn and jasonetteios[1] to build ios apps.

[1]: https://github.com/Jasonette/JASONETTE-iOS

I track my time daily with a recipe using my iOS location to add my arrive and leaving time at work to my Google Calendar.

https://ifttt.com/applets/133380p

Absolutely, I have medication that I have to take the 72 hours so I have a recipe that the checks Google calendar for the event that says "medication", and when the recipe finds it at 7:15 AM every 3rd day it makes all of the LIFX bulbs in the house flash green. This is my only reminder as relying upon these recipes for life-saving medication is not a good idea, but it has been an excellent aid d'memoir which hasn't let me down once in about 3 years.

I am quadriplegic and IFTTT as the central hope the so many different aspects of my life that I would be completely lost without it, it's a brilliant tool for disabled people even though it wasn't designed as such. I must have 30 or 40 recipes that I use on a daily basis for things ranging from medication reminders, turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again when I come home amongst loads of other things. It would take something pretty spectacular to tempt me away from their service.

That said, not entirely convinced about the new changes, maybe it's just teething troubles but I've had problems with a couple of recipes over the past week that have been rock solid for at least 3 years so hopefully they will settle down because that would be fairly catastrophic failure if they didn't.

Still, 9/10 would recommend!

> ...turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again when I come home amongst loads of other things.

Do you have some sort of smart-home controller that controls these devices (e.g. a Wink or SmartThings hub) and IFTTT integrates with said controller? If so, what about the hub is insufficient and requires you to use IFTTT?

I ask because as someone who thinks IFTTT is neat, every time I look at any recipes especially regarding home automation, I don't see anything that I couldn't do with home-assistant or even with my Wink hub or Veralite controller when I used those. Instead, it looks like I'd just be offloading functionality onto a remote service that adds yet another failure point to the system.

No, I try to avoid any kind of hub because I don't want to be locked into one particular way of doing things. That's why I chose LIFX over Philips Hue, LIFX bulbs are just plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and controlled from an app on your iPhone, iPad or laptop and away you go. I didn't want a cupboard full of hubs controlling lots of discrete bits of the house, a hubbard if you will.

So if there is any centre to my system then it is my iPhone and iPad, and I make sure that whichever piece of home automation I buy it has some ability to connect to If This Then That. This has been made infinitely easier with the new Make channel, which means I can just send a POST request from any old bash script to trigger any number of actions.

I've never heard of any of the three things you mentioned, but unless they were all capable of being controlled from the one device, in this case my iPhone then it would be virtually impossible for me to use them. You see the iPhone has world-class access for disabled people, I can do everything with one switch on my wheelchair that an able-bodied person can do with their two hands. Normally disabled access to devices is some terrible and crippled subset of functionality that we've been stuck with, that's when those of us with motor skill difficulties are even thought of at all, for most people disabled means blind and deaf and that's doubly true in technology circles. There is no other group of devices that a quadriplegic and just take out of the box and start using within five minutes then the iPhone, iPhone and any of the computers running OS X, believe me I've searched!

At the moment I have one iPhone with a series of apps, I also have DragonDictate for Mac on my laptop and iMac which allows me to pair up voice commands with AppleScript's and bash scripts. Which means that the number of things I can do is literally endless as long as the piece of hardware I bought has some ability to be controlled via the network.

That's what interests me so much about this project, I would love to bring something that can do what IFTTT can do in-house and maybe run it on a Raspberry Pi so that I'm only reliable on my local network and not the Internet. That would be awesome.

Anyway, I'm going to stop rambling and hope that I've answered some of your questions! I'm happy to answer any you might have, I'm also open to any new idea that would help me control bits of my house more easily.

I have a couple of websites where I detail this sort of stuff, robotsandcake.org is my not-for-profit stuff where I give talks at places like Google and for the UK foreign office in Mexico discussing how technology impacts the disabled, and I also have inventability.net which is basically a collection of hacks and tricks that my partner and I have learned over the past 10 years of my being quadriplegic. That's only been going a few months, so it's still a little light on content but if there's anything you see missing and you'd like me to explain I'd be happy to make a post about it!

Anyway, the people at IFTTT are lovely and I don't want to hurt their feelings by cheating on them behind their back with this young upstart! :-)

If you're interested in running things in-house, you should definitely take a look at home assistant.[0]

Also, if you haven't already, check out the Amazon Echo; it has pretty solid support for a lot of home automation tech.

-- [0] - https://home-assistant.io/

Thanks, will do!

That sounds amazing, but the dependency you're getting into makes me feel a bit uneasy. Surely your stuff can be ported somehow if something happens to the infrastructure you're relying upon?

Oh, I completely agree that I have massive single point of failure here, believe me! But it's such a convenient and easy-to-use single point of failure that it is almost irresistible, as I mentioned in another reply I would love to be able to bring the functionality that I get from IFTTT inside by network and run it on something like a Raspberry Pi, that would be great.

At the moment I'm relying upon lots of discrete apps all glued together with one web service, now if the web service stops working I can still turn the lights on and off using the LIFX app and I can still control my heating using the Heatmiser app; but what I can't do it any of the logic stuff that I find so useful, turn the heating on at X time and make the lights are lovely warm colour at the same time sort of thing.

I'd love devices that respond to simple post requests that I can run with bash scripts, over 10 years of experimentation that seems to be about the most stable system I've seen.

But yes, if IFTTT stops working tomorrow and it's going to be a major pain in my bottom and I'm going to have to recreate a lot of my systems from scratch. Which is why the search for robust systems under my control is never really going to end.

I have a couple of long-form RSS feeds which aren't suitable for consumption in an average RSS readers. New items in these feeds get automaticall added to my Instapaper account.

Plus a lot of social media aggregation into our team Slack channel, so I don't need bother checking Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc. everytime a collegue posts something somewhere.

> I have a couple of long-form RSS feeds which aren't suitable for consumption in an average RSS readers. New items in these feeds get automaticall added to my Instapaper account.

Interesting - I find long-form content is usually easier to read in Feedly than in whatever website it's coming from.

Not sure if I'd call it "non-trivial" (as I'm using it to make other code more trivial), but I use IFTTT to ease up on the coding required to fully automate ongoing background personas for bots/AIs.

Rather than coding boring frameworks to post to Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/500px/Wordpress/etc (or spending time implementing/maintaining existing libraries), I just hit my web APIs to fetch what to post and post it through IFTTT. Sucks that some destinations (e.g. Facebook) have the source app it posted through ("IFTTT") at the top, but most people overlook/ignore it.

Pretty useful to us: Google Calendar reminder to Slack for group hangouts (15min reminder). Then people can just click the link right in their slack client.

We do this with a simple "/remind #channel to get on the hangout http://url-to-hangout every Friday at 3pm". If group hangouts aren't as regularly timed, I can see the appeal in the Google Calendar IFTTT recipe.

Using IFTTT as part of a system to tune insulin delivery https://twitter.com/danamlewis/status/788209253722918912

I use it for api monitoring. It hits various endpoints for trainspottr.fm and pings me if anything is amiss.

I use ifttt for forwarding rss feeds to pocket

There's also the hugely popular Huginn, if you're on a Ruby stack (Trigger Happy seems to run on Django) https://github.com/cantino/huginn

Another Huginn fan here. Super useful and so much more flexible than anything hosted like ifttt.

Huginn is great, but I wish it was easier to chain stuff together. Node RED has an awesome UI, but the building blocks are aimed at something else entirely.

What sort of stuff do you find hard to build?

Scrapers of sites that involve some conversion of data. The main gripe is that you can't modify a flow of agents in a single interface, so adjusting stuff involves a lot of going back and forth.

Agreed- we hope for Scenarios to evolve into this eventually, but I agree that it can be clicky right now for big changes.

I never thought to use Huginn as an IFTTT replacement. I may have to spool up an instance; I wanted to before, but I have never thought of a compelling need that Huginn would solve.

Seems like the perfect kind of app to build on sandstorm.io, since it's something you'd probably want to own on your own servers.

I don't think Sandstorm can run daemons or cron jobs as of yet - the apps are stopped after a bit if the user logs off.

I think support for cron jobs is coming soon, but the other challenge is that they're still working out the best way to allow apps to make outbound network connections. It's doable now, but requires administrator access.

I love IFTTT, but one of the biggest missing features is the ability to do If This ... OR this ... Then That... And That And That.

Unfortunately, all of the recipes are one dimensional - so you can't build recipes like "When my nest thermostats senses someone is nearby AND it is 8AM-10AM in morning and it is December or January then turn on the heat on.

If IFTTT implemented this feature there would be a TON of killer recipes out there.

There's a company out there called Yonami (www.yonami.com) that has an app for mobile that sort of does this - but unfortunately it is a bit buggy and doesn't integrate with as many apps.

Hey. You can check out www.triggi.com . We support multiple conditions and actions.

for HN, that's not your best page to start with. I'd go with this one https://blog.trigger-happy.eu/pages/informations.html

Why did IFTTT become so bad with the recent changes? Why did they have to "improve"?

The updated app is horrible to use compared to the old one.

I'm not sure but I'm not happy with the change. I thought they did a great job of making conditional logic easy for the masses through their 'recipes'. The new applets hide what little complexity the service previously had and now its just confusing to me.

If you're on iOS (Android soon), try Stringify. Multiple ANDs/ORs/cascading actions, etc *I work for Stringify

is there going to be a web version?

Android first, then we'll look at web.

I do not seem to be able to create a flow that when I push the button it will call some URL with certain parameters. Does that exist?

Yes - add the 'Maker' thing - it will send HTTP GET/POST/PUT.

Or Triggi (www.triggi.com) . Direct competitor to Stringify from the NL. Disclaimer: I work there as Creative Technologist

The change in the service is a direct reflection on their best guess at how to best answer the return on investments they have taken. These changes rarely benefit the customer's pocketbook, or at least IFTTT's version of a given customer's pocketbook.

Why the heck haven't Google bought this, or at least made their own clone? It's a superb service.

The whole point of the service is to automate stuff so you don't have to open their webpage ever again if done properly. This doesn't bring advertising revenue in.

This is why I like that project. User cant be disturb as this self hosting service is yours. You are the master on board :) Do what you want ; do what you need ; share or dont etc. It is a toy that renders service.

On top of that, this kind of interactions are usually used by power users (individuals, not business), so it wouldn't be as popular nor profitable as they need (e.g.: Google Reader was a fantastic tool but they shut it down anyway).

Are you sure ? What are you basing this on ?

I thought Zapier was mostly business, and it's been running for a while now: https://zapier.com/

Alphabet/Google also buy things that may have a big impact on internet usage as a mechanism to deliver more ads.

Indeed, that's the goal: reliable! :)

Perhaps someone high up in Google uses it and doesn't want it killed after a couple of years? ;-)

I think there's an overlap with Google's services. With Google, I: 1. get a notification if the roads are busy on the way to work. 2. notified when bills (that I received via email) are due. 3. and more that I can think of right now.

That's just with the Google (formerly Now?) app. With Allo and other apps Google's services are going to improve without you doing ANY ifttt-like rules.

i saw ifttt advertising an overhaul lately only to find you STILL can't join two conditions (eg. if I leave work AND its past 5pm, send a text)

This. IFTTT is much too simplistic for anything useful. Sure I can let it save all Gmail attachments to Google Drive. But if I want to do that for only certain attachments I'm out of luck.

If you want to achieve this, you can use Google Apps Script.

I use it to forward certain mails to Slack and to do automatic Gmail clean up.

Oh and its made with django. Nice. Going to give this a test drive.

One of the great things about IFTTT is the number of services that are plugged into it. (They number in the hundreds) this has about 10 which is nice but nearly enough. Also the ones that make it a killer app for me are the gApps integration which this lacks entirely.

I can't take this website seriously. But the project seems interesting.

Yeah, another guy posted a better link: https://blog.trigger-happy.eu/pages/informations.html

That's a name that I like.

Loved the description of Trello. Kanban application. :)

The front page does a terrible job of explaining exactly what this product does.

A little nitpick, the slider is hugely unnecessary.

The whole layout is lifted straight from a free bootstrap template aimed at cafe websites, slider images and all. I know this because I've used it for my girlfriend's cafe's site.

I wont be against some help for this main page :-) I just try to do my best .

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