Installing Nodes

The building blocks of any Node-RED application are the nodes in its palette.

Node-RED comes with a number of core nodes that provide the basic components, but the palette can be easily extended by installing additional nodes.

Nodes are published as npm modules and the project provides an online catalogue of them at https://flows.nodered.org.

There are two ways to install nodes - via the command-line or from within the Node-RED editor.

Node-RED Palette Manager

To install a node from within the editor, select the Manage Palette option from the main menu.

This opens the Palette Manager which shows two tabs - a list of the modules you have installed and a searchable catalogue of modules available to install.

Switch to the Install tab and search for random - you should see node-red-node-random in the list below. Click the install button next to it.

After a short time the node will be installed and added to the palette.

Command-line

To install on the command-line, switch to the Node-RED user directory and run the appropriate npm install command. For example:

npm install node-red-node-random

Node-RED User Directory

By default, Node-RED creates a directory called .node-red in the user's home directory. As it starts with a . it may be hidden from view by your file browser.

As mentioned in the Install section, Node-RED logs the full path to the user directory when it starts up. If in doubt, check what it says.

Note

Some nodes will have external dependencies that cannot be automatically installed by Node-RED or npm. You should always check a module's readme for further information. This will be particularly true of some of the TensorFlow nodes we'll be using later in this workshop.

Next Steps

The next task is to create you first flow in Node-RED.