Trigger Happy: An opensource clone of IFTTT

by vmorgulis • 10 years ago

334 79 10 years ago

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

sofaofthedamned• 10 years ago

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

quickben• 10 years ago

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.

foxmask2• 10 years ago

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.

zimmund• 10 years ago

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).

invisible• 10 years ago

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

RA_Fisher• 10 years ago

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

sandebert• 10 years ago

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

emmelaich• 10 years ago

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.

xparadigm• 10 years ago

Loved the description of Trello. Kanban application. :)

danso• 10 years ago

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

robk• 10 years ago

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

tokenizerrr2• 10 years ago

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.

tectonic2• 10 years ago

What sort of stuff do you find hard to build?

mmanfrin• 10 years ago

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.

pryelluw• 10 years ago

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

simplify• 10 years ago

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.

icebraining• 10 years ago

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.

mnutt• 10 years ago

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.

chrisper2• 10 years ago

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.

Splendor• 10 years ago

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.

klinquist3• 10 years ago

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

kordless• 10 years ago

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.

aceperry• 10 years ago

That's a name that I like.

asow92• 10 years ago

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

ThisIs_MyName• 10 years ago

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

kmf• 10 years ago

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

codezero2• 10 years ago

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 :)

ketralnis• 10 years ago

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.

boogadaboogada• 10 years ago

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.

nkg• 10 years ago

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

scrollaway• 10 years ago

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.

robbiemitchell• 10 years ago

Try Zapier for that.

oddlyaromatic2• 10 years ago

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.

Pamar• 10 years ago

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.

morgante• 10 years ago

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.

sorenjan• 10 years ago

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.

flashman• 10 years ago

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.

Angostura• 10 years ago

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

nacs• 10 years ago

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.

minikomi• 10 years ago

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

roylez• 10 years ago

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

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

Zemke• 10 years ago

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

escapologybb4• 10 years ago

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!

crymer112• 10 years ago

...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.

muyuu• 10 years ago

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?

cstuder• 10 years ago

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.

lmm• 10 years ago

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.

drusepth• 10 years ago

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.

gdilla• 10 years ago

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.

andruby• 10 years ago

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.

nleach• 10 years ago

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

afro88• 10 years ago

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

findjashua• 10 years ago

I use ifttt for forwarding rss feeds to pocket

vxNsr• 10 years ago

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.

andrewchambers• 10 years ago

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

gegtik• 10 years ago

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)

splitbrain• 10 years ago

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.

hasperdi• 10 years ago

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.

k2xl• 10 years ago

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.

mpfundstein2• 10 years ago

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

arcyus• 10 years ago

A little nitpick, the slider is hugely unnecessary.

party_carpet• 10 years ago

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.

foxmask2• 10 years ago

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

Trigger Happy: An opensource clone of IFTTT

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