Node-Red is no-code workflow automation with lots of extensions. (hackaday.com)

submitted 1 year ago by HumbleHobo@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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I know a lot of people dismiss this thing as only being useful for RaspberryPi IOT automation, but I've been using this for a year or two now on my own personal server and I'm surprised how flexible and performant it is.

It's more than just a prototyping tool, and it has a lot of integrations designed by the community. For instance, within a couple weeks of ChatGPT being announced, there were already flows created to automate integration. https://flows.nodered.org/

I've been thinking about introducing this tool to my work as a replacement for some of the older and less-used APIs we maintain. Have you had any experience with Node-Red? Would you like to check it out? I can help you set it up if you want too, it's fun learning about this tool and what's possible with it.

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[-] Naate@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I've been using nodered with homeassistant for a few years, and have also used it to add minor integrations for some external apps to send push notifications through HA.

On the surface, nodered looks like "programming for non-programmers", and I've seen it get knocked for that. It's really not that at all. Yes, it's a node-based system and you're not "writing code" but it's very robust and can do a heck of a lot. I highly recommend folks check it out, it's a pretty powerful little system, and I've been running it on my ancient amd fx-6300 server (along side a bunch of other docker containers) without any noticeable system slowdown.

[-] towerful@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

On the "node programming isn't programming".... I've made a lot of money using things like Node-Red and TouchDesigner (seriously, TouchDesigner is the love of my life)

[-] HumbleHobo@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

The low-no-code things it has are pretty remarkable, but I think in order to craft something of any sufficient complexity, you are still going to need to writing code somewhere, whether it's a function node to finesse json into a special structure, or to check and make a decision about what to do that is outside the limitations of the existing nodes, or maybe a template node javascript, but I can say without a doubt that it's been a very pleasant experience playing with it.

[-] Naate@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

100%. I have some function nodes to do things in JS, especially for date checking. And I think you can even get it to call shell scripts? I'm sure there's an add-on that would do it.

Agreed that it really is a pleasant experience.

[-] HumbleHobo@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Executing command line options I believe is out-of-the-box functionality. I found myself wanting to do something that wasn't contained in the existing nodes and it's really easy to make command line calls.

[-] towerful@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Node-red is amazing.
I have done so many interesting things, strange integrations, quick and dirty glue-code with node-red...

Before I knew about node-red, I bought into some proprietary home automation system (mostly for my boiler and servicing of it). What a mistake.
I wish I could apply node-red to my home.

If I don't know of a solution to a specific problem, chances are I'm going to use/recommend node-red

[-] stilgar@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

You can apply node red to your home, it's very popular to use with home assistant!

[-] lupec@lemmy.lpcha.im 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Node-RED is amazing! I find it strikes such a good balance between usability and user friendliness, been using it for automations alongside Home Assistant for a while. Outside of the usual IoT scenarios, you can also use it kinda like Android's Tasker if you get creative enough, as in for general purpose automation. Closest alternative of sorts I've found for PCs so far.

I remember using it to expose my (dumb) keyboard's RGB lighting as a controllable entity within Home Assistant at some point lol, that was a convoluted setup. Had a Windows PC where Node-RED would call a DIY python script that would then use a library to interface with the keyboard. I then managed to wire that up to HA somehow. Fun little project, for sure.

[-] HumbleHobo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I don't know exactly why I did this, but I thought it would be fun to see how much of an API I could build for this app I was building, and I managed to build an OpenAuth implementation into it and a bunch of rest calls. I feel like I might need to move this onto another language though, but it seems to be working beautifully so far.

[-] lupec@lemmy.lpcha.im 1 points 1 year ago

Damn, that's impressive. You've got me beat there for sure!

[-] isosphere@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I love it in principal, but I found it reliable for long term operation. I was trying to use it as part of a home automation setup. Kept it updated, just had to be restarted all the time.

Your experience suggests maybe this isn't true anymore; are you aware of a time when stability was bad and now it's fixed?

[-] HumbleHobo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

To my knowledge, I've been using Node-Red as a service on my server (using NSSM) and it's reverse-proxied through Apache and it's pretty damn solid. I think maybe a long time ago when I started using it, it might have had some nodes that caused it to halt (and catch fire) but I think that might have been a bug that was fixed. It's been solid for a while now.

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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023

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