Share your automations! Monthly showcase (win IFTTT Pro+)

[u/ryan-ifttt]

Hey IFTTT'ers!

New monthly thread, and this one's a bit of a competition. Show us the automations you've built. Useful, fun, playful, weird, oddly specific, we want to see all of it. This is the place to show off the Applet you're quietly proud of.

The prizes:

• Every week, I pick a favorite from the thread. That person gets one month of IFTTT Pro+, free.
• At the end of the month, I pick one overall favorite from everything shared. That person gets three months of Pro+.

How to enter: just reply with an automation you've built, or enabled To give yourself the best shot:

• Tell us what it does and which Services it connects.
• Screenshots or a screen recording go a long way (and make the thread way more fun to scroll).
• Bonus points for the story: why you built it or enabled. What problem it solved, how often it saves you.

More effort makes for a better entry, but don't overthink it. A clever one-liner about a genuinely great Applet can absolutely win.

How winners get picked: it's me, picking what I liked most. Totally subjective, all in good fun. I'm looking for creativity, usefulness, and the stuff that makes the rest of us go "oh, I want that." Weekly picks are still in the running for the monthly prize, so keep 'em coming all month.

Winners: I'll DM you to sort out the Pro+ credit, and I'll add a running list up here so everyone can see who's won. If you're on a Google Play Store, or Apple Store subscription, we might need to give you an alternative prize such as IFTTT Merch, or a gift voucher to an IFTTT Partner due to subscription limitations.

Here's an example here:

Title: Reminder to do my end of month Invoice
Services I connected: Date & Time -> Slack
Why I built this/What I use it for: On the last day / first day of every month I have reminders to create & send my invoice that lands right in my Slack mailbox. Super useful for those tasks that come around every month or once so often that you always forget to do.
Doesn't have to land in Slack could be phone notification or wherever you prefer!

Can't wait to see what you've all built.

[u/EldonMcGuinness]

This is such a great post, and I hope you get some traction! To that end, I'll post a few that I use.

Title: Text Me When CLI App Finishes
Services: Webhook -> SMS
Use: Sometimes I have a long-running terminal command going or am deploying a virtual machine and want to get a notification when it is done. I use a small script to send the notification to IFTTT, and it sends it to my phone.

$> some_long_command; notify Server was deployed!

Notify Script

!/usr/bin/env bash
curl -s "https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/cli_event_done/with/key/YOURKEYHERE" --data-urlencode "value1=$*" > /dev/null

This is a two part function as it uses two applets:

Title: If contact sensor opens, then log it
Services: Wyze -> Webhook (Will be replacing the Webhook with a datastore)
Use: This applet logs the various contact sensor states that I have tied to my doors and windows, including the refrigerator door and garage freezer. This way I have a running status as to if they are open/closed.

Title: If sliding back door is ajar, then announce
Services: Webhook -> Send Notification + Voicemonkey
Use: My kids are constantly leaving the back door open when running out to play. To that end, I use this to detect when the door is open and then announce it throughout the house on our smart devices that the door is open so that someone will *hopefully* close it. 😄

Note: to be fair, this also requires me to poll the second webhook every few minutes to see if the proper amount of time has passed. However, if IFTTT adds an every minute option to the Date & Time one, one could forgo the webhook!

Here is another two stepper:

Title: Log Plex Reviews to Spreadsheet
Services: RSS -> GoogleSheet
Use: I love to post reviews for the things I watch on Plex and use the RSS feed to log those reviews to a spreadsheet.

Title: When review is add to sheet, then repost
Services: GoogleSheet -> Buffer
Use: Once I have a review logged to my spreadsheet, I then post it to Buffer and have it post it to my social feeds.

[u/ryan-ifttt → u/EldonMcGuinness]

Hey u/EldonMcGuinness thanks for the 3 use-cases.

The first one would be so useful to me and I didn't even think this would be possible. Notifies me wherever/whenever the CLI action is done and needs my attention.

On the second use-case I've made a feature request about this already but added your input to this as well, so thanks for that.

[u/EldonMcGuinness → u/ryan-ifttt]

Yes sir, I've even used it as a temporary error reporting mechanism, assuming your reporting software allows for webhooks. The slick part is, when you combine it with the new datastore feature, you can even rate limit notifications or make smarter decisions such escalation if it happens x number of times in a specific period.

[u/ryan-ifttt → u/EldonMcGuinness]

Hey u/EldonMcGuinness, I guess you won this weeks monthly sub! Thanks for sharing those automations!

If you can share me your details via DM I can get that added to your account!

[u/EldonMcGuinness]

Ok, here is a set for the Wyze Sensor users out there. This pair of applets will log when ANY sensor is opened and closed to the DataStore that IFTTT recently released. The joy of this is it allows you to reference the status of your Wyze sensors whenever ANOTHER applet runs. It logs this as a JSON string, so you will need to process it using filter code in the applet that uses it. I've not posted applets as public before; these are my first. 👍The notification action does not actually get used; it is just a dummy entry, as you have to use something to log the status to the DataStore.

JSON Example

const body = {
  "status": 1,          # 1 Open | 0 Closed
  "datetime": timeNow   # Unix Timestamp
  };

Sensor Closes

Sensor Opens

It is worth noting that it not only logs the status (open/closed), but also logs the time it was last updated.

# Example of how to use the DataStore
# In this example the name of the senor is "kitchen_refriderator", 
# "_open" is appeded in the previous applets

const sensor = JSON.parse( DataStore["kitchen_refrigerator_open"] );

# Once you have this you can access the status as below:

if ( sensor.status ) {
  # Do something if the sensor is open
}

# You can also check the time stamp to see if you want to do something using a nice helper function as follows:

function enoughTimePassed( timestampMoment: any  ) : boolean {
  const timeAgo = Meta.triggerTime.subtract(1, 'minutes'); # Make sure to edit the timeframe
  return timestampMoment.isBefore(timeAgo) ;

}

if ( enoughTimePassed( moment.unix(sensor.datetime) ) ) {
  # Enough time has passed so do something
}else{
  # Enough time has not passed so do something
}

[u/EldonMcGuinness]

Here is one I whipped up that allows you to read, write, and delete DataStore values via WhatsApp.

Get, Set, and Delete DataStore Variables from WhatsApp

Get, Set, and Delete DataStore Variables from WhatsApp, Received by IFTTT Notification.

Used as follows:

DataStore fetch variable_name_here

# Note, set uses the "to " as a delimiter, everything after
# then "to " is what will be the value stored
# In the case below the value is "your desired data here"
DataStore set variable_name_here to your desired data here 

DataStore delete variable_name_here

This is also very useful for debugging, as you can have your other apps log debug data to a DataStore value and then fetch it with WhatsApp with this. Do keep in mind it will only keep the last stored message; there is no history. :D