In fact, running Node-RED as root is a bad idea in general. If you have a specific reason why you need to run it as root, try to figure out a workaround using the sudoers file or permissions elsewhere to get a lower user run it. But really, there are no valid reasons to run it as root. Especially not because with the exec node it runs all commands as root, and it comes with a web interface to edit those. There are a few topics on this already mentioning this...