HI,
I’ve installed Home Assistant on a normal linux/ubuntu system using the guide here: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/installation/virtualenv/
It’s my preffered way as the server is used for other things as well.
Now, i’ve seen the node-red integration that there is and would like to try it, however. It seems that this is only available via hass io.
Are there ways to add these add-ons to a non-hass.io installation?
No. ATM addons are purely a hassio thing.
However, you can install node-red on your system and use it with HA. There is no need for an addon. See https://nodered.org/ for installation instructions.
even more in general, i dont think there are any addons that are not available for other systems.
an addon is just a bridge between an existing program and hassio.
This is not the first time I have seen this misconception. Can you help us figure out where this misinformation comes from?
I think this is simply because everything points to using hass.io
I did find https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assistant but don’t know node-red and how it would integrate. So, what i’m basically missing is a good install manual for when you’re not using hass-io.
I have installed node-red now and the node-red-contrib-home-assistant and have the HA nodes in node-red, but it’s not working because of some configuration issue (it tries to get the /homeassistant/services and this results in a 404).
I’m sure i’m doing something simple wrong, but i haven’t found out what…
thanks for the help so far!
You probably need an API password set in your config.yaml in HA, and there is a strange bug with node-red HA palette which requires to deploy ANY flow, literally anything, before it will connect to HA.
grab an inject node and tie it to a debug node. Deploy. Then try to connect node-red to HA
If you aren’t using hassio, you just install node-red based on your platform. Node-red really has nothing inherently to do with Home Assistant, so it’s just another app that runs on your network or on your HA server.
That’s clear now. Your previous message cleared things up a bit. The deploy issue is clear. I see node-red now trying to get the services but failing. So i set the API password and now it’s failing on my self signed certificate 
one of the many reasons I prefer a reverse proxy to handle my certs, so internal stuff on my network doesn’t have to fight that crap
One thing that I don’t think is noted in the discussion is that by standing up your own node-red instance outside and connecting it to home assistant is that you can’t secure node red with home assistant credentials. So if you expose your node red instance outside your network, you’d probably want to configure some sort of security on node-red.
I’ve been doing some digging to see if it was possible to run the actual addon container (which has the home assistant authentication integration and defaults with the home assistant pallet thing), however, it looks like the authentication actually goes through the hass.io supervisor and then goes to home-assistant. So the home assistant node-red addon docker image definitely requires hass.io. But like others have said, you can run the node red official image on it’s own and point it to home assistant to get the flow integration.
Im using an Android/Kodi box for my home Assistant install and because of this didn’t want the extra resource usage of docker.
If you want nodejs as a service you can do:
apt install nodejs
bash <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/node-red/raspbian-deb-package/master/resources/update-nodejs-and-nodered)
and then enable/start the service, the majority of Hass.io addons can be installed as services, it’ll just take a quick look at the manual install instructions for you to find out how.
In what universe is it a good idea to expose your node-red to the internet? Use VPN, or SSH tunneling.
Are you looking to access the interface externally?
If so what usage cases would you have? You’ll get better advice if people know what you are trying to do.