So, with NR 1.2.x Node is not a global install?

[Andrei]

@Nodi.Rubrum

I find... that the node-red-serialport module was not installed, yet it was clearly qualified in the package.json, under ~/.node-red/ on a new Pi image. So out of 40 odd modules installed, one was not?

Not surprisingly and the likely explanation is here:

Unable to start node-red after upgrade to 1.0.2

some packages ship with pre-built versions of binaries for the most popular platforms (eg serialport) - so don't need tools - but if there is a combination they don't have (or there is no prebuild) then they have to be built - eg serialport on Armv6 for Pi - so it is entirely possible that this package may have shipped node10 binary but not yet node12 - etc. ( this is the the main long standing reason we recommended the LTS versions of Node.js ). Our windows install docs do talk about how to i…