Show HN: Beehive – An open source IFTTT powered by Go's templating engine

by mueslix • 9 years ago

247 44 9 years ago

pierrec2• 9 years ago

I recently tried to use this kind of system to pipe news from facebook pages into an RSS feed. Impossible. Facebook hand-picks which developers get API access, and only allows ultra-restricted usage, so for example there's no way they would allow API access for a generic Beehive user, even just for reading public posts.

Want to scrape data from the HTML? They aggressively detect anything that may or may not be automated, and give you a CAPTCHA.

I see it as yet another abuse of their monopoly position. So many artists post public updates exclusively to this platform, and this is exploited to make sure everyone stays locked in and is forced to use facebook directly, ads included. Even the slightest competition would make it obvious how ridiculous this is, but the current monopoly is self-perpetuating.

mueslix5• 9 years ago

Since you would self-host your own Beehive instance, there's luckily a way around that: create your own Facebook app for development (you will never publish it) and use its tokens to connect your Beehive with it.

That being said, there's no Facebook Hive yet (any takers?), but that's exactly how it works with the Twitter Hive.

AznHisoka3• 9 years ago

Facebook doesnt hand pick anyone to its api.

just create a facebook app (no approval needed), have users sign in to that app to get their access token. then use the api posts endpoint to get all posts from any page. its that simple

pierrec2• 9 years ago

OK, facebook hand-picks the authorization for an app (and its associated API access) to become public. They also hand-pick private access to more advanced API features. It's still essentially impossible to create an easy-to use program that reads public facebook posts, since each individual user has to create a developer account. I guess my first post was poorly phrased, but the main point remains that their policy forces the general public to use their front-end, and none other, to view any posts on public pages.

Solinoid• 9 years ago

could you maybe run an android fb app in a vm then sniff the traffic?

nreece• 9 years ago

Give our service at https://feedity.com a try for Facebook pages (or any other public webpage) into feeds. It's stable and scalable.

nl• 9 years ago

This is mostly wrong.

It's true they probably won't allow a generic Beehive user. But they will allow individual users to setup their own app accounts which will get access to public posts.

This seems to meet the above usecase exactly.

no1youknowz4• 9 years ago

Quite interesting that this just been posted.

I have to produce an events application with a UI similar to this: http://i.imgur.com/e0R1Kp5.png

The UI is already done, so that's not the reason for the post.

My question is, on the backend, is there a pattern I can use to easily execute the steps?

I know there is a combination of logic, cron, a MQ and a db to hold the flow. But I am unsure on how best to approach the development of this framework.

Probably if someone is passing by and you've built something like this. I'd love your input as I'm a bit unsure how to proceed.

I'd really like best practice and implement something that is robust!

Thanks

rashkov• 9 years ago

I think that you're probably looking for a finite state machine. There are a number of libraries for this, so have a look around and pick one that looks good. I haven't used it myself but would love to hear about other people's experiences with them.

no1youknowz4• 9 years ago

Thank you for the "finite state machine" mention. I haven't seen this in my research so far. Will be adding this to the list to look up.

thawab• 9 years ago

would love to use it. the only people i know who has something similar are

- treeline.io which is backed by sailsjs.

- aws step functions. Used to coordinate lambda functions. check https://states-language.net/spec.html

jnbiche2• 9 years ago

aws step functions...

By the way, AWS step functions allow the creation of state machines just like @rashkov mentioned in the adjacent comment. If you don't mind being locked in to AWS, using step machines with lambda functions would be a great way to do this.

kawera• 9 years ago

Maybe you could get some inspiration from http://nodered.org. It's pretty generic despite the IoT mention.

redindian75• 9 years ago

which library did u use to make this flowcharty UI?

no1youknowz4• 9 years ago

I needed a diagram to showcase my question. This isn't my UI.

However, I used https://jsplumbtoolkit.com to create my own UI.

sogen• 9 years ago

Conversio.com offers abandoned cart recovery

PixelMath• 9 years ago

that interface looks really useful, is there anyway I could get my hands on something like that. It'll be of even greater benefit if you can describe the process of building that interface. edit: nevermind I read the comments down the thread

andrei_says_• 9 years ago

This looks amazing. Thank you for making it available as open source -- I can see how a vibrant community could ensure quality and up to date modules.

roylez• 9 years ago

I have been using huginn for more than one year and I am very satisfied. What's the difference between huginn and beehive?

mueslix5• 9 years ago

huginn is a great project, by all means keep using it! The need for Beehive originally stemmed from our local hacker space, where we wanted to run a little daemon for 'home-automation' tasks, with the ability to control it via IRC. huginn was just too much of a beast for our Raspberry Pi and so we started hacking away on Beehive.

It's certainly a lot lighter, younger and less feature-complete than huginn - but it's also a lot easier to deploy and maintain in comparison. It's written in Golang, if that's your cup of tea, and really easy to extend.

alrs• 9 years ago

If you ask nice, I bet you could get Ari Lerner to give you getbeehive.com.

https://github.com/auser/beehive

mueslix5• 9 years ago

I guess it can't harm to ask nicely. Thanks for the tip!

lop• 9 years ago

"Shortly" we had that topic here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441913 But most of the stuff is not alive anymore...

But there are some interesting new ones:

https://github.com/cantino/huginn

https://trigger-happy.eu/infos

not sure if this is alive: https://sourceforge.net/projects/semanticwebpipe

Do you know some other (open source) event and agent system tools? (there are tons of commercial hosted IFTTT clones, they are not interesting...)

IshKebab• 9 years ago

Node-RED seems similar and looks like it has a nicer interface (I've not tried it though).

jsilence• 9 years ago

Node-red also has a lot of connectors, from messaging eco systems to databases and is very flexible. If you hit a wall to the available node then you can always hand code Javascript in a function node.

The Raspbian Distro comes with Node-red pre-installed. Fastest and cheapest way to give it a try.

stephenr• 9 years ago

There is/was Factor.io, but I'm not sure its still active.

mellis83• 9 years ago

Project Flogo: http://flogo.io

aryehof• 9 years ago

Documentation doesn't mention it, but this appears to not work on Windows - at least not out of the box. Annoying to go to the trouble of downloading it to try, to discover it was never going to work.

Intermernet3• 9 years ago

This actually seems to be a problem with certain test fixtures in one of the dependencies: (github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda) .

The offending files are:

json/statuses/show.json?id=404409873170841600

json/statuses/show.json?id=738567564641599489

This occurs because Windows can't have question marks in the file names.

I would suggest creating a pull request, or an issue on that repo asking that those files be renamed and the test logic be modified to not require the files to have the question marks (a simple character replacement in the required tests should probably do the job).

Intermernet3• 9 years ago

EDIT: There are some more issues! It uses github.com/guelfey/go.dbus which as far as I can tell will never really work on Windows.

smcleod• 9 years ago

Neat! I've been looking at a few things similar to this for various purposes recently, one thing I'd like is some sort of mix of this plus some content analysis system for managing an email inbox and then performing actions based on and using the data contained within, for example an email comes in with some sort of semi-structured data / information - it's contents is analysed, it's put in some sort of group like a 'this is an SNMP alert' then the data is formatted / munged into another form of structured / passable days and then routed off to another email address, I.e. Create a markdown / whatever table, Look for IP addresses and FQDNs, pair them if they're on the same line and create an extra column with a human-usable hyperlink, send it on to an email that logs a ticket in whatever ticket management system is in use at the receiving end. That's just one simple example I could make up off the top of my head, but I'd like to easily create some neat logic rules based on the content and then use some of that content to decide where it should be routed onto, again to use a ticketing / helpdesk situation as an example just because it's what I thought of just then - an email comes in and if it contains certain keywords or phrases a response will be sent back with a table / list of information to fill out in the form of questions like 'please include the following information in your reply...' and it might have some basic information gathering steps for the end user like getting their IP address, OS etc... then when they reply the system could pickup that data, munge / transform it into some sort of standard / structured format, do some more troubleshooting like pinging the IP provided, doing a whois, perhaps relating the data to a list of clients or something and then passing it on to the right team or ticketing system via email again. I think the key to this would be to use something like the OSS product mentioned here that's more modern and lightweight coupled with a nice query / rule builder interface that's fast and responsive and easy to test. Business rules / logic apps I've used in big corps in the past have been a combination, mix of, or all of the following: slow and resource hungry, proprietary with all forms of vendor lock-in, hard to build rules and apply them, require up to a whole team to support and maintain them, and often not technically focused / directed.

Kexoth• 9 years ago

When I started learning Elixir/Phoenix this type of system was the first thing that came out of my mind when I was covering the Erlang/BEAM/OTP parts because of their nature.

If anyone else is interested in starting something similar in Elixir just ping me :)

Show HN: Beehive – An open source IFTTT powered by Go's templating engine

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