I personally believe that is out of scope - NSSM is perfectly viable (in the right hands).
You issue was being unaware that NSSM chose by default to run under the system
account. It does this for very good reason.
Like any user, the system
account has a "home" directory.
The reason you dont find any flow files using a regular search (from your own user account) is because the system
users files are protected from other users (again - for good reason)
If you want to find your old flows etc, you should have enabled the logging in NSSM...
... then you would have seen something like ...
30 Oct 15:49:29 - [info] Flows file : C:\WINDOWS\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\blah\blah\flows.json
Or a quick search on the internet for Where can I find system data stored by a Windows Service would have revealed the location %systemroot%\ServiceProfiles
The point is, you seem like (no offence) a "regular" user (not a power user / windows expert) and the NR docs are not really a place to teach or preach - it is not an easy balance.
However, we would definitely consider a PR to the docs around this area.
Moving forward...
My recommendation would be...
- move your node-red userDir to
c:\something
- make sure the service account AND your user account have read-write access
- set NSSM to run
node-red -p 1880 -u c:/something
- set the NSSM "log" tab up to output STDOUT and STDERR to write to log files in
c:/something
and enable log rotation - Enable NSSM
NOTE: c:\something
should really be something like c:\node-red-1880
- the above was for illustration purposes