I have developed a dashboard-2 UI node, which sometimes needs to fetch external web resources such as CSS stylesheets or icons, located on the server.
The UI widgets need to have web access to these resources. I know I can configure an httpStatic root in settings.js, but looking for an "out-of-the-box" web root, without forcing additional system-level configuration.
There is a default dashboard web-root (<Node-red user dir>\node_modules\@flowfuse\node-red-dashboard\dist), but (as per web security) it will only allow me to point to "upward" locations (subfolders) which get erased upon every dashboard upgrade.
Currently I am solving this by fetching the resources during initialization of the server node and piggybacking them on the config object (sent to the widgets upon widget initialization). But this is cumbersome and not flexible.
As always, if you are pushing to the edges of one of the Dashboard implementations, you might find it easier in the long-run to use uibuilder which does not make assumptions or constrain you.