This is a little lengthy, but I wanted to share the tactical details of my use case to give you a full picture:
I use Node-Red for a few scheduled activities: archiving Reddit posts or tweets I upvote and pulling information from real estate websites that match criteria I’m interested in.
I like Node-Red vs. cron-managed shell/Python scripts for several reasons:
- the admin/editor UI is accessible on any device with a web browser (no git, ssh, etc. tooling required)
- the node-based visual flow is easy to reason about and debug (so even after years of ignoring my scripts I can quickly come back to them and grok what’s going on)
- the barrier to entry continues to be low (I can pop in and create a new flow in <1 hr)
I prefer it over Zapier or IFTTT since it’s more flexible. I’ve authored arbitrary JavaScript and request logic to retrieve and filter data in ways these pre-packaged tools can’t.
I run it on an AWS LightSail server for ~$4 per month. I use Ansible to manage Ubuntu with podman + systemd running the Node-Red docker image and TLS provided by Caddy. Roughly ~4 hours to setup from scratch and something I return to once every ~18 months to update/tweak with minimal issue.
To sum it up, I appreciate the grok-ability + flexibility + accessibility. It just works and it scales in complexity as I need it to!
I use Node-Red for a few scheduled activities: archiving Reddit posts or tweets I upvote and pulling information from real estate websites that match criteria I’m interested in.
I like Node-Red vs. cron-managed shell/Python scripts for several reasons:
I prefer it over Zapier or IFTTT since it’s more flexible. I’ve authored arbitrary JavaScript and request logic to retrieve and filter data in ways these pre-packaged tools can’t.I run it on an AWS LightSail server for ~$4 per month. I use Ansible to manage Ubuntu with podman + systemd running the Node-Red docker image and TLS provided by Caddy. Roughly ~4 hours to setup from scratch and something I return to once every ~18 months to update/tweak with minimal issue.
To sum it up, I appreciate the grok-ability + flexibility + accessibility. It just works and it scales in complexity as I need it to!