Tag Archives: Huginn

Tweeting with Huginn and Twurl

After deploying Huginn I wanted to connect my Twitter accounts, so every blog post would be automatically tweeted.

The problem is, there seems to be an issue in the Twitter Service either in Huginn or at Twitter. which I’m sure someone is working on fixing it.

However, I was able to find a workaround by using Twurl, a curl-like application for interacting with the Twitter API.

You will need to do a couple of things.

Make sure you have a Twitter app API (click here for more info)
Make sure you have ENABLE_INSECURE_AGENTS set to true in Huginn’s .env
Install twurl. It was not available as a FreeBSD package, I installed it using RubyGems: gem install twurl

Next, you need to authorize your app (commands from Twurl’s README.md) with the same Unix user that’s running Huginn;

twurl authorize --consumer-key key       \
                --consumer-secret secret

And now we need to set up a new Shell Command Agent.

Now, I had to spend a lot of time to make it work, the command-line options are very… sensitive.

This is what I ended up with;

{
  "path": "/",
  "command": [
    "/usr/local/bin/twurl",
    "/2/tweets",
    "-A",
    "Content-type: application/json",
    "-d",
    "{\"text\": \"{{title}} | {{url}}\\n{{content | strip_html | replace: '\\n', ' ' | truncate: 128}}\"}",
    "-t"
  ],
  "unbundle": "true",
  "suppress_on_failure": false,
  "suppress_on_empty_output": "false",
  "expected_update_period_in_days": 15
}

Let’s go one by one.

The path does not matter, as we’re not interacting with files.

I am running FreeBSD so my twurl command path would be /usr/local/bin/twurl. You may run which twurl to find yours.

The /2/tweets is the resource we’re sending a request to, -A is for headers, and -d specifies the data of the body (hence, implies it’s a POST method).

My sources are RSS feeds, so I’m using things like {{title}} and {{url}}, you can do whatever you want. Since I’m inserting a JSON in the JSON, I had to use \\n so it converts to \n in the command. Be careful about that.

In the end, -t will “trace” the command, so we can see (if needed) the POST request as well as the result.

The unbundle parameter tells Huginn to not use the Ruby Gems that are in Huginn, instead, the command is run in a clean environment, outside of Huginn’s bundler context.

I left everything else as is.

Now, you can tweet from Huginn.

NOTE: You can use the -u flag with twurl to specify which account to use, refer to Changing your default profile for more info about that.

And now, all works fine.

That’s all folks…

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Huginn on FreeBSD

Huginn is probably the best automation software that I’ve ever seen. It’s not only easy to use, but also easy to deploy and easy to extend. Unfortunately there’s no FreeBSD port for it, but looks like it’s something wanted by the community, at least according to WantedPorts.

I realized that I have at least 5 accounts on IFTTT, which is also an amazing automation service. However, 3/5 of these accounts were not “my own”. It belonged to our communities. You know, Meetups in Armenia and news listing websites similar to Lobste.rs. So if I get hit by a bus, it will be very hard for our community to operate these accounts, that’s why I wanted to deploy Huginn.

Like a sane person, I deploy in FreeBSD Jails (I recommend you do too!). Which meant there’s no official (or maybe even unofficial?) docs on how to deploy Huginn on FreeBSD.

It’s written in Ruby, which means it should work and should be very easy to ports. I’ll go over the deployment needs without the actual deployment, setup of Jails, or anything similar. Let’s go!

First thing first, you need Ruby thingies:

ruby
rubygem-bundler
rubygem-mimemagic
rubygem-rake
rubygem-mysql2

Here’s the full command for copy/paster:

pkg instal ruby rubygem-bundler rubygem-mimemagic rubygem-rake rubygem-mysql2

Next, you’ll need gmake for makefiles and node for assets:

pkg install gmake node

This should be enough. I’m also going to install git-tiny so I can follow their updates with ease.

pkg install git-tiny

Okay, let’s make a separate user for Huginn.

pw user add huginn -s /bin/tcsh -m -d /usr/local/huginn

Let’s switch our user

su - huginn

Okay, now I’m going to clone the repo 🙂

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/huginn/huginn/

At this point you can go do installation.md#4-databases and configure your database.

You should also do cp .env.example .env and configure the environment, make sure to set RAILS_ENV=production

Next, as root, you should execute the following

cd /usr/local/huginn/huginn/ && bundle install

You might get an error saying

In Gemfile:
  mini_racer was resolved to 0.2.9, which depends on
    libv8

Don’t panic! That’s fine, unfortunately it’s trying to compile libv8 using Gems. Even if we installed the patched version of v8 using pkg, it still doesn’t work. I’ll try to workaround that later.
I an ideal world, all of these Ruby Gems should be ported to FreeBSD, I’m not sure which are ported, so I’ll just be using the bundle command to install them. And that’s why we use Jails 🙂

Anyways, the dependency Gem is mini_racer, comment its line in Gemfile

#gem 'mini_racer', '~> 0.2.4'      # JavaScriptAgent

Now let’s run Bundle again

cd /usr/local/huginn/huginn/ && bundle install

Okay! everything is good!

Let’s also build the assets, this one should be run as the user huginn

bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production

NOTE: If you get the following error ExecJS::RuntimeError: ld-elf.so.1: /lib/libcrypto.so.111: version OPENSSL_1_1_1e required by /usr/local/bin/node not found then you need to upgrade your FreeBSD version to the latest patch!

Aaand that’s it, everything is ready.

For the rest of the deployment process, such as the database, nginx, etc., please refer to installation.md

Currently, I’m running Huginn in a tmux session running bundle exec foreman start, but in the future, I’ll write an rc.d script and share it with you, too.

That’s all folks.

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Fortune in Times of Need

I was setting up Huginn on FreeBSD, I needed to do some manual testings of commands before I automate them, one of them was using twurl to Tweet. When I was trying to tweet in Armenian, the terminal prompt was giving me a bell. I realized that I needed to change the locale.

When I opened another shell to change the locale, FreeBSD’s fortune printed the following:

In order to support national characters for European languages in tools like
less without creating other nationalisation aspects, set the environment
variable LC_ALL to 'en_US.UTF-8'.

Ah, thank you!

By the way, if you ever saw a fortune that you liked and you needed it later, but didn’t remember the details, you can do fortune -m pattern freebsd-tips, here’s an example:

% fortune -m USB freebsd-tips
%% (freebsd-tips)
If you need to create a FAT32 formatted USB thumb drive, find out its devicename
running dmesg(8) after inserting it. Then create an MBR schema, a single slice and
format it:

# gpart create -s MBR ${devicename}
# gpart add -t fat32 ${devicename}
# newfs_msdos -F 32 -L thumbdrive ${devicename}s1

                -- Lars Engels <lme@FreeBSD.org>

Cheers.

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