Node-RED installation on Apple M1 computer

General
1

Hi Node-RED users,

I just moved from an old Mac mini to the M1 Mac mini 2020 by doing a Time Machine restore using the backup of the old Mac mini. I realize that by doing so, I have transferred a lot of intel code, but thanks to Rosetta everything appears to be working. I can connect with an external browser to Node-RED and everything looks good to the point that I do not know how to stop/start Node-RED via the terminal.

When I enter "node-red-stop" it comes back with "zsh: command not found: node-red-stop".
The terminal has now changed from bash to zsh and obviously tries to find Node-RED at a different location from where it was on my old Intel Mac mini.
"which node-red" returns "/usr/local/bin/node-red".
After already spending far too much time getting homebrew and influxdb@1 installed for M1 native code, I thought I better ask the community whether I should also try to upgrade node.js + Node-RED and if so whether there are online instructions on how to do it. I could not find any.

Should I decide to stay with the intel code, I guess I need to modify .zprofile and/or .zshrc in order to be able to do node-red-stop/-start/-log? but how?

thank you for your help,
greetings from freezing Bavaria

Karl

2

I run NR on my mac mini M1 with no issues and NR is installed in the same place.

Paul@PaulsM1 ~ % which node-red
/usr/local/bin/node-red
Paul@PaulsM1 ~ %

I don't believe you can use node-red-start and node-red-stop on the mac. I just open a terminal and use node-red and leave the terminal window open.

3

thanks zenofmud,

you are right, i confused it with my other node-red raspberry pi installations and forgot that on my Mac mini I had installed PM2 as outlined in Starting Node-RED on boot : Node-RED

so I can stop/start with "pm2 stop node-red" and "pm2 start node-red"

This leaves my question open whether it would be beneficial to upgrade node.js + node-red to M1 native code.

4

If you move to the ARM build of NodeJS you can rebuild any native components of the installed nodes by running npm rebuild in the Node-RED userDir (normally ~/.node-red but logged at startup)

You would also want to re-run sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm node-red to make sure that things like bcrypt get rebuilt as well for best performance as well as any of the other core components.

5

thanks hardillb,

would you say, that it will be worth the trouble to move to the ARM build of NodeJS?

6

Running a native build is always going to be quicker than a transpiled or emulated version.

7

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