After Node-Red addon update lots of "link out nodes" gone

sender · October 14, 2020, 4:53pm

Is there anyone experiencing after a recent update of the node-red add-on the removal/disappearing of link out nodes? I had a lot of them and they just are “gone”…

Before you say, did you remove the link in node, no I did not change anything in node-red recently only updated the add-on…

Hellis81 · October 15, 2020, 5:51am

Which update? Node red? HassOS? or Home Assistant?

sender · October 15, 2020, 6:43am

See title of topic an location of topic

michaelblight · October 15, 2020, 10:43am

I’ve seen discussion like this over at the NR forum. For example https://discourse.nodered.org/t/link-node-connection-disappearing/33271

sender · October 15, 2020, 11:05am

Yes! this is very “alike”… omg… this is making every node-red update now very exiting and tensed

code-in-progress · October 15, 2020, 12:07pm

This is yet another reason why I run NodeRed standalone and I don’t update it unless there is some super killer feature that I want. It took me over a year just to upgrade to the 1.1 version.

NodeRed, for as fantastic as it is, never seems to have a good upgrade experience. When I upgraded to the 1.0.1 version, I lost half my common nodes due to a botched npm install. Took me days to get NR back to normal.

So now, I sync my flows up to github, backup my ~/.node-red directory, upgrade NodeRed and say a small prayer to any deity that will listen while that happens.

sender · October 15, 2020, 12:11pm

Well the thing is, I take a full (vmware) snapshot every hour, so if something goes wrong I can go back. But I also change a lot and sometimes (like this nod red thing) I just notice too late and then reverting back to a snapshot. is also not desirable, so either way it …

Which brings me to: Is there any way to automate a node red backup of have some sort of snapshot mechanism in there?

code-in-progress · October 15, 2020, 12:50pm

Given that you are running on hassio, I’m not sure (I run Core in a Docker container), but what I do is I back up my ~/.node-red/ directory up to github. All of it. That way, I can always rollback to previous flows and such. You can also setup a project in NodeRed itself and it will backup your flows and nodes to github automatically.

sender · October 15, 2020, 12:55pm

Where can that be done?

code-in-progress · October 15, 2020, 1:01pm

Hamburger menu (top-right of the screen) > Projects > New

https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/

sender · October 15, 2020, 2:05pm

code-in-progress · October 15, 2020, 2:07pm

You have to enable projects in your settings.js file and then restart NR.

editorTheme: {
       projects: {
           enabled: true
       }
   }

sender · October 15, 2020, 2:07pm

How do I get there if I had the addon?

code-in-progress · October 15, 2020, 2:08pm

Hmmm… Um… Not sure? Give me a sec to look at the docs. I don’t use the addon.

sender · October 15, 2020, 2:10pm

And if I enable that… What will it exactly bring me? If I do not want to couple it with a git?

code-in-progress · October 15, 2020, 2:14pm

SACRILEGE!

Projects in NodeRed allow you to basically “package” your flows (and node dependencies) into a single unit. So, if you ever wanted to move over to another instance of NodeRed or restore a backup. However, this requires git as a backing source. When you deploy flows in a project, the flows and nodes automatically get backed up into git for safekeeping.

If you don’t want to use git, then I think you could backup your flows.json file manually, but I don’t know how to do that in hassio and the NR addon.

michaelblight · October 16, 2020, 1:45am

For the NR add-on, the settings file is under the “node-red” folder in the HA config folder. That’s where flows are stored too.