Node-Red Install

Node-Red is a great tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services.

This guide wil show you how to install Node-Red onto your Raspberry Pi.

Required Equipment

The next post will show you how to enable WiFi on a wireless Raspberry Pi.

Make sure you are SSH into your Raspberry Pi.

I am working on a Windows computer, thus I use PowerShell to SSH into my raspberry Pi.

Assuming you have Rasbian installed.

Open a terminal and enter the following:

$ sudo apt update && apt upgrade upgrade -y

This will update your Pi to the latest version.

To download install Node-Red, enter the following command:

$ bash <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/node-red/linux-installers/master/deb/update-nodejs-and-nodered)

This will install the latest version of Node-Red along with other libraries and packages needed to run Node-Red.

Note: Everytime you reboot or turn your Pi off and then off, you need to manually start Node-Red with the node-red-start command.

Run the following command to let Node-Red autostart on boot:

$ sudo systemctl enable nodered.service

Reboot your Pi with sudo reboot.

You will lose your SSH connectin, wait for about 20 seconds and SSh back into your Pi.

To access Node-Red, check your Pi host name with hostname -I.

Open your favorite browser and enter your hostname with port number 1880.

Example: 192.168.9.100:1880

This is an optional step, but highly recommended as this will prevent someone else on the same network to access Node-Red.

Stop Node-Red with the following command:

$ node-red-stop

This will allow you to make changes to the Node-Red configuration file.

Go into the Node-Red folder:

$ cd ~/.node-red

Install node-red-admin:

$ npm install node-red-admin -g

Create a new password by entering the following:

$ node-red admin hash-pw

You will be prompted to enter a password.