Today I did a change that confused me in regards to the default flow name. Since I use (sometimes) the Project feature and many times old environments I got different default flow names: flows_pi.json, flows.json or flow.json.
Perhaps the documentation deserves to be revisited for this specific point ?
Node-RED uses
flows_<hostname>.json
as the default flows file. If the computer you are running on may change its hostname, then you should ensure you provide a static file name; either as a command-line argument or using theflowsFile
option in your settings file.
As a matter of fact that changed since v2.0.0.
Default flows file name
We've also updated the default settings file to hardcode the flow file name to
flows.json
. Previously we left it unset, so the runtime would use the hostname to generate the flow file name. That would catch people out when moving between networks. As this is a change to the default settings file, all existing installs will continue to behave as they did before.
and when using "Projects" you will be prompted to use the default flow name: flow.json
(flow.json not flows.json).
I wonder if the documentation would be more clear if it explains like the change log from v2.0.0.
My issue was that I stopped using the Project feature for a specific enviroment and copied flow.json
to the home Node-RED folder. It did not work at first, so I had to rename the file from flow.json
to flows.json
(and copied also to flows_pi.json
- just in case).