NodeRed is one of those projects that look so cool I'd like to have a reason to use it. So far nothing, but maybe I'll be automating my home one day and it will come useful.
I'd be interested to hear how people use this outside of IoT context?
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!
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.
* We watch all the content on Jellyfin/Netflix/BBC on computer attached to our TV. Node-Red checks if browser is in full screen periodically and sends status to Home Assistant via MQTT. With this I can change the lights when watching TV.
Generally I have migrated some scripts to Node-Red like:
* Mirror FTP, extract archives, look for keywords, clean mp3 tags, add to Jellyfin
* Check emails for daily emails of solar plant, run regex to extract number and feed into Home Assistant.
* Send requests to website with property listings for a certain area, if there is a result, send a notification to my phone.
I’ve used nod-red in corporate production for:
(1) Mapping partner leads that could only be provided as an email into our CRM endpoint.
(2) Synthetic canaries for application connectivity.
(3) Other integrations where an existing service provider was not able to provide a modern solution (webhook) and this filled the gap for low volume.
I find it’s a tool that can be used to get something up and running very rapidly and be used for a longer period beyond proof of concept.
It's good for IoT and automation because it's fundamentally a framework for discrete functional reactive programming. It could be good for any context where you need to tie together a bunch of events from different contexts that all depend on each other to drive some other behavior. You can design design nodes and flows that minimize state and keep it local.
NodeRed doesn't really have anything specific related to IoT. It's just a generic automation platform for doing things like cronjobs and putting together simple dashboards.
I wonder if they now support branching. I always thought it was basically a visual programming language until I tried to use it. But it's really more like a visual pipe.
Not OP, but I actually use it in home assistant. I manage all my integrations and dashboards with home assistant but automations are so much easier to do in nodered than HA. Installing nodered via HA's supervisor is a one click affair and it is automatically connected with all your devices.
I use Node-RED and Home Assistant. They compliment each other very nicely.
At the time I started, Home Assistant's automation capabilities (scripts, automations) were very clunky to deal with, so anything but the simplest things were done in Node-RED. Home Assistant has gotten a lot better in this respect, so I'm doing less in Node-RED these days.
One really neat thing about Node-RED (with the appropriate addons) is that you can create entities in Home Assistant that are populated by Node-RED flows. I use this to fetch the garbage collection schedule and expose the next pickup times for each collection (garbage, organics, recycling) as entities. I've also got a garbage pickup notification that tells me which things will be picked up the next day so I don't have to think about the collection schedule at all.
I'd be interested to hear how people use this outside of IoT context?