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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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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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[–] HumbleHobo@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 (1 children)

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 2 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.