When is a the flow saved

General
1

I'm sure this has been asked many times...but, my search terms didn't find me an answer... :frowning:

When is a flow saved? (it is saved to a .json file right?) Is it saved when you hit deploy?

And what determines the flow that is started at reboot (or server restart)?

Thanks

2

It is saved when you deploy it. When you start Node-RED it uses a flow called flows_your-machine-name.json

3

That depends how you have set it up to run at boot. What OS are you running on and how did you install node-red?

4

Running on Raspberry Pi. Raspbian. NR installed using the bash/curl etc.

5

Autostart is controlled by the systemctl service file /lib/systemd/system/nodered.service that is created by the pi install script. By default it runs node-red as the user that ran the install script so it will pick up the flow from that users .node-red directory. If you run

node-red-stop
node-red-start

it will stop and restart node-red using the service file and you will see in the terminal which flow file it runs.

6

You should be also be able to find the name of the flow by opening a terminal window and doing a cd .node-red and then a 'ls -al *.flow which should show you the name of the flow.

7

To add to all the valuable answers you've already had, here are some more details.

As has been said, by default Node-RED will use ~/.node-red/flows_<hostname>.json.

You can change that in a number of ways:

  1. by specifying the file you want to use on the command line - https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/running#command-line-usage.
    This approach isn't really suitable if you're running as a service on the Pi as it would require you to edit the service definition file - which would get overwritten when you upgraded.

  2. by setting the flowFile property in your settings file (~/.node-red/settings.js)

Node-RED actually creates two files for your flow; flows_<hostname>.json contains your flow configuration and flows_<hostname>_cred.json contains any credentials your flow uses.