purdue-huddle

Keeping Huddle events fresh

Why this needs setting up at all

Every other source in purdue-mcp is fetched live. Huddle cannot be, and the reason is worth understanding before you debug it:

gethuddle.social sits behind Vercel's bot challenge. Every plain HTTP client — curl, fetch, the MCP server itself — gets 429 with x-vercel-mitigated: challenge, whatever headers it sends. A real browser clears the challenge in about a second on a normal home or campus connection, and never clears it from a datacenter address. That was measured, not assumed: the same headless Chrome passed on a laptop and sat on "Vercel Security Checkpoint" indefinitely from a VPS.

So there is no server anyone can run that stays fresh. The fetch has to happen on a machine like yours, which means you run it.

Setup

One command, using a Chrome/Chromium/Edge/Brave you already have:

npx -y purdue-mcp-huddle

It writes ~/.cache/purdue-mcp/huddle-purdue.json (~1.7 MB, about 2,600 events) and huddle_events picks it up on the next call. Takes ~4 seconds.

Nothing is installed as a service, nothing runs in the background, and no browser profile or login is touched — it launches a throwaway profile, reads the public events API from inside the page, and exits.

Keeping it current

New flyers appear daily, so a copy from last week will miss this week's callouts. Pick whichever fits the machine:

# cron (Linux/macOS)
crontab -e
7,37 * * * * npx -y purdue-mcp-huddle --quiet

# systemd user timer (Linux) — survives reboots, catches up after suspend
# Use OnCalendar, not OnUnitActiveSec: the monotonic clock stops while a
# laptop sleeps, so an interval timer silently drifts by the length of
# every nap.

On a laptop that sleeps a lot, running it by hand when you actually want events is honestly fine — the tool always tells you how old its copy is.

Options

Flag / variable	Effect
--out <path>	Write somewhere else. Pair with PURDUE_MCP_HUDDLE_MIRROR.
--college <name>	Another Huddle campus. Default Purdue University.
--quiet	Errors only, for cron.
PURDUE_MCP_CHROME	Path to a browser, if it is somewhere unusual.
PURDUE_MCP_HUDDLE_MIRROR	Where huddle_events reads from — a file path or a URL. Overrides the local copy, so a club or a household can share one file.