Node-Red is no-code workflow automation with lots of extensions.

hackaday.com Automate Your Life With Node-RED (Plus A Dash Of MQTT)

For years we’ve seen a trickle of really interesting home automation projects that use the Node-RED package. Each time, the hackers behind these projects have raved about Node-RED and now I&#…

https://nodered.org/

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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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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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)

12 comments