[awendland]

This is a little lengthy, but I wanted to share the tactical details of my use case to give you a full picture:

I use Node-Red for a few scheduled activities: archiving Reddit posts or tweets I upvote and pulling information from real estate websites that match criteria I’m interested in.

I like Node-Red vs. cron-managed shell/Python scripts for several reasons:

  - the admin/editor UI is accessible on any device with a web browser (no git, ssh, etc. tooling required)
  - the node-based visual flow is easy to reason about and debug (so even after years of ignoring my scripts I can quickly come back to them and grok what’s going on)
  - the barrier to entry continues to be low (I can pop in and create a new flow in <1 hr)

I prefer it over Zapier or IFTTT since it’s more flexible. I’ve authored arbitrary JavaScript and request logic to retrieve and filter data in ways these pre-packaged tools can’t.

I run it on an AWS LightSail server for ~$4 per month. I use Ansible to manage Ubuntu with podman + systemd running the Node-Red docker image and TLS provided by Caddy. Roughly ~4 hours to setup from scratch and something I return to once every ~18 months to update/tweak with minimal issue.

To sum it up, I appreciate the grok-ability + flexibility + accessibility. It just works and it scales in complexity as I need it to!

[NhanH]

Seems a bit similar to what huginn is designed for. Can anyone familiar with both describe the difference between them?

[dugite-code]

Huginn is designed as an automation system where as Node-red is designed as a visual programing system. Node-red is much more flexible than Huginn out of the box and you can extend it quite easily. Some basic tasks might need more setup and general understanding of what you are doing than with Huginn, but I found Node-red much more straight forward for getting useful outputs.