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Installing Node-RED

Scope: getting Node-RED v5 onto a machine and seeing it answer — the npm route the project documents, what it needs first, and where its files live.

What it needs

Node-RED is a Node.js program, so the one hard requirement is Node itself. Node-RED 5 wants a currently supported Node — version 20 or later; the lab ran v24. Everything else (npm, the package manager) arrives with Node.

Check what you have:

node --version
npm --version

Check: two version numbers. If node is "command not found", install Node from nodejs.org first — the LTS release is the right choice on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike. On a Raspberry Pi or a Debian/Ubuntu server, your distribution's Node package is often too old; the project's documentation links a setup script for the Pi and NodeSource packages for Debian-family systems. Too-old Node is the commonest install failure: Node-RED will refuse or misbehave rather than explain.

The install

The project's standard route is one npm command, which puts node-red on your path:

npm install -g node-red

(The lab, being a lab, installed it into a scratch folder instead — npm install node-red, then ran ./node_modules/.bin/node-red. Same program, same version banner; the global route is the one to live with.)

Windows note: the command is the same, run in PowerShell or a terminal; npm may need an administrator terminal on some setups, and corporate antivirus occasionally objects to npm's script steps — a work machine is the hard mode of this chapter.

First run

node-red

Check: a banner and, within seconds, lines like the lab's first start (transcript nodered-run1.log):

[info] Node-RED version: v5.0.9
[info] Node.js  version: v24.22.1
[info] Server now running at http://127.0.0.1:1880/
[info] Started flows

Open that address in a browser and the editor appears — chapter 3 takes the tour. Two things in the startup chatter deserve a look now:

  • The user directory. Node-RED keeps everything that is yours — flows, settings, credentials — in one folder, ~/.node-red by default (on Windows, C:\Users\<you>\.node-red). The lab used -u userdir to keep its mess in a labelled place. Chapter 10 explains why this folder is the backup.
  • The credentials warning. A first start prints a block warning that your flow credentials file is encrypted with a system-generated key, and that losing the key means losing the credentials. It is not an error. It is the program telling you to set credentialSecret yourself — chapter 9 does it.

Stop Node-RED with Ctrl-C. Nothing else to configure yet: it is deliberately pleasant out of the box, and deliberately open — remember that anyone on your network can now open the editor. Chapter 9 closes that door; until then, treat a running Node-RED like a running stove.