Pochade Node-RED

For Writing Node-RED Plugins with Passion

Pochade Node-RED is a lightweight, opinionated generator for building Node-RED nodes (plugins) with modern standards but without the bloat. It sets up a clean, vanilla JavaScript environment so you can focus on writing the logic for your node.

Features

• Instant Scaffolding - Generates a complete, ready-to-deploy Node-RED node project.
• Auto Reload and Install - Work in the nodes home directory, our watch script auto-installs and auto-reloads node-red when you make changes in the folder.
• Interactive Setup - easy-to-use CLI questionnaire to configure your node.
• Vanilla JS - No complex build pipelines by default, just standard Node.js and HTML.
• Developer Experience - Includes helper scripts to easily install your plugin into your local Node-RED instance for testing.
• AI Ready - Includes documentation to help AI assistants (LLM.md, AGENTS.md) understand your project structure.

Quick Start

Create a new Node-RED node project with a single command:

npx pochade-node-red my-node-red-plugin

cd into the new directory.

Installing to Local Node-RED

To test your node, you need to install it into your local Node-RED environment. We've included a handy script for this:

npm run install-plugin

Watch Mode

If you are making frequent changes, you can use:

npm run watch

This will start node-red and on every text change will re-install the plugin to the ~/.node-red node_modules directory and restart node-red.

Project Structure

my-node-red-plugin/
├── src/
│   ├── my-node.js         # The Node.js runtime logic
│   └── my-node.html       # The Editor UI and help text
├── bin/                   # Utility scripts
├── package.json           # Node-RED module metadata
└── README.md              # Documentation for your user

License

Unlicense (Public Domain)

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome at github.com/lnsy-dev/pochade-node-red