Node-RED user api to restart the application (Node-RED)

[TotallyInformation]

@TotallyInformation

Which reminds me of something I meant to do. I'll add a comment to the security FAQ entry to remind people to protect settings.js from Node-RED itself.

Added, hopefully others will add their thoughts too.

Protecting Node-RED from itself

Because Node-RED is a general-purpose computing tool, it has the capabilities to make changes to the underlying Operating System environment. So if you want your instance of Node-RED to be "safe", especially in production and customer environments, it is important to prevent Node-RED from making changes to its own environment. Here are the things you should certainly do as a minimum if you need a secure environment: Protect settings.js While you cannot prevent it from changing certain thin…

@Colin

Did you realise that the specific suggestion was to allow the node-red user to use sudo with only the node red restart and reboot commands and nothing else? That does not sound particularly dangerous, or am I missing something?

I did, yes. But as with anything related to security, it is easy to take a specific suggestion and generalise it without thinking through the consequences.

Things are protected by sudo for really good reasons, it isn't done lightly. So undoing that - especially if allowing access to editors who possibly don't understand operating system security - is going to have consequences.

In this case, the most obvious would be accidental or deliberate denial-of-service.

There are some things that, while you CAN do them in Node-RED (because it is a great compute environment), doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

There are other, non-Node-RED methods for restarting services which is something that should indeed be restricted to an admin separate to a Node-RED admin. Similarly, you don't HAVE to install/update/remove node modules from Node-RED itself. It is a nice feature but probably terrible in a production environment. In such cases set up a separate admin script that an OS admin has to run. Maybe use Node-RED to create a request form so that your users can still request changes to node modules but an OS admin has to actually run them after due dilligence.