A dashboard is its own document rather than widgets placed in a flow.
Node-RED's dashboard tab is 260 nodes, about forty of them pure layout,
which is exactly what the small-graph principle exists to avoid — and
since the graph is already wired by message name, a widget can bind to a
name without belonging to any flow.
Stored beside the flows in the same repository, sharing their write lock
and commit, under a directory the flow listing ignores. No draft/publish
split: nothing executes a dashboard, so edit mode is its own staging area.
Two things it needs from the engine. A message catalog spanning every
flow, because a wall panel shows the heating next to the solar and the
flow-scoped API is the wrong shape for that. And a way to put a value in
without owning a node — a slider is a real value that happened to come
from a person — which runs whatever consumes it and applies the same type
check a node's output gets. Only a message some flow declares can be
published to; flows own the namespace.
Charts also need more past than the 120 points a sparkline wanted, so a
chart widget declares its depth and the engine keeps that message's
series that deep.
Everything that goes wrong already travelled the event bus, but the only
subscriber was the editor's websocket — so a flow quarantined at three in
the morning was invisible until someone opened the browser.
An alert manager now watches the same bus and forwards failures to ntfy,
email or a webhook. Most of what it does is decline to send: the same
node failing every second is one alert with a count of what followed, a
connection flapping up and down is muted until it settles, and nothing
gets past ten notifications an hour. Verified against a live instance —
six identical failures produced one alert carrying the real traceback
message.
Channels and rules are configured through the API, with a test send so a
channel can be proven before anything depends on it.
Execution was fire-and-forget: an MQTT message or webhook ran a cascade
on a ThreadPoolExecutor built for that one wave, and an engine that died
halfway through simply lost whatever was in flight. Concurrent triggers
each built their own pool, so load meant unbounded threads.
Every external trigger is now journaled to a Redis Streams queue before
anything runs, and acknowledged only once its cascade finishes. A
consumer thread drives cascades on one long-lived pool while node bodies
run on another, so a cascade cannot starve the nodes it is waiting for.
A reaper reclaims what a dead consumer never acknowledged — verified end
to end: work journaled while the engine was stopped runs on restart, and
work abandoned mid-cascade comes back as a second delivery.
At-least-once needs a guard, so nodes that reach outside are marked
non-idempotent and skipped on a redelivery they already completed.
Without Redis the queue degrades to an in-memory one that does not
pretend to be durable, and interactive callers still run inline.
Also fixes two things this turned up: a delay node was sleeping on a
worker thread, where a handful of them could occupy the whole pool, and
webhooks 404'd whenever MCP was enabled because the app mounted at /
answered first for every path.
nodes.py had grown to 2k lines holding every integration behind a single
blanket mypy exemption. It is now a package split by the outside world
each node talks to, so the exemption shrinks to the four integration
modules; base and mlp are type-checked, which turned up a dozen missing
annotations.
The senders opened a fresh connection — and, in the MQTT case, a fresh
thread pool and event loop — for every single message. HTTP senders now
share one pooled client, and a publisher holds one broker connection for
its lifetime, fed from a bounded queue that drops the oldest value when
the broker cannot keep up.
An HTTP sender also no longer trips over a JSON reply that is not an
object: outputs are keyed by port, so a bare scalar is a valid reply with
nothing to publish.
The API image ran four uvicorn workers, and each one built a full flow
controller — four sets of MQTT subscriptions, cron ticks and webhooks.
Runs one worker now; scaling out is the worker split, not more processes.
Adds a loop-lag watchdog and a deep /utils/health/ that fails when the
event loop is wedged or Redis is unreachable, the two failure modes a
process-alive check never sees. Autoheal restarts on that signal, behind
a compose profile because it mounts the Docker socket.
The private user-seeding routes now need an explicit opt-in rather than
just ENVIRONMENT=local, so a deployment that kept the default never
exposes them.
The engine now speaks MCP at /mcp, with a built-in OAuth 2.1 authorization
server in front of it: an agent registers itself, sends a human to the browser
to approve it, and exchanges the resulting code for a token. PKCE is required,
codes are single-use and stored only as hashes, the browser is redirected to
the URI that was registered rather than the one asked for, and refresh tokens
rotate so that replaying a spent one revokes the whole line.
Twenty tools cover reading, building, publishing and running flows, and each
one calls the same REST endpoint the dashboard calls, in-process, carrying the
caller's own token. That keeps one description of what a flow is and what may
be done to it — validation, the draft/publish split, the version check — and
means an agent can do nothing a person could not do in the browser.
Agent tokens are RS256 with a keypair of their own rather than the secret that
signs browser sessions, so deleting the key withdraws every agent without
logging anyone out, and deps.decode_token grew the branch that trusting a
second issuer will need when the hosted login arrives.
Connectors are the device-facing node class third parties write, so the
surface they build against is versioned and documented: ConnectorNode carries
a declared contract version, a polling loop that publishes only what changed
and reports health around it, and parameters whose credential fields are
marked x-secret so the editor offers the secrets store instead of a text box.
They are found through the fluksio.node_types entry point group, with the
package's own metadata as the manifest. docs/connectors/ has the contract and
the authoring guide; connector-skeleton/ is a working one to copy.
The controller no longer knows what any node type is: start, stop and
report_health are protocol methods on Node, and the built-ins were migrated to
them first, so the hooks a connector implements are the ones the engine has
been driving all along.
Marking a node reusable moves its source to _lib/ and points the node at it by
name. Other flows instantiate it with their own ports and settings, one fix
reaches all of them, and a shared source still in use cannot be deleted.
Ports gained an interval: an output publishes, and an input wakes its node, at
most every n seconds. State keeps the latest value, so only the delivery is
skipped, and pressing Run is never throttled.
Also fixes autosave sending no version on its first save of a session, which
made every flow saved more than once conflict with itself.
Flows can now be taken off the engine and put back. Stopped state lives in a
runtime.json beside the flow, not in the flow document: the canvas autosaves
that document, so a stopped flow would otherwise start itself again on the
next edit. A stopped flow gets no subscriptions, schedules or webhooks, its
nodes are skipped by the scheduler, and running it answers 409. Pausing holds
a flow's nodes while its values keep arriving, so the canvas still shows what
is coming in.
Node code is user code and print is how it says things, so stdout is teed
through a contextvar sink active only during a node execution — one event per
execution, capped, so a chatty node cannot outrun the stream. A node that
fails sends its traceback the same way, trimmed to the author's own frames.
The dock gains a logs panel and a pause control; the dashboard replaces its
placeholder with what is running, stopped or failing; the edge inspector can
send the last message again.
Single-stepping is deferred and noted: the scheduler keeps no progress between
calls, so a step button would re-run the same node rather than advance.
Makes the flow engine reachable from the API, which is what M3 needs before
any of it can reach the browser.
- app/flow is a package now; the prototype's watch-dir scripts and the
matplotlib/networkx visualiser are gone with their dependencies.
- Messages carry a serializable dtype instead of a live Python type, and a
port name, so the graph can speak qualified names while node functions keep
local arguments. Redis state is JSON, not pickle.
- Message names are namespaced per flow ("heating.temp"); a bare name resolves
to its own flow, a dotted one crosses flows.
- Several nodes may provide the same message: producers are a list, so fan-in
is a real edge instead of a silently dropped one.
- Flows are stored as flow.json plus node sources in a git repository, one
commit per save, with identical saves skipped so autosave stays quiet.
- Node failures are isolated and reported per node; validate() returns cycles
and unconnected inputs instead of raising deep in a run.
- Credentials live in an encrypted store and are referenced as {"$secret": …}.
- Engine events reach websocket clients through a bus, so values, node status
and execution show up live.
The submodule collapse was only half applied: .gitmodules was deleted but
backend/ and frontend/ were still recorded as gitlinks, so none of their
files were tracked. Replace the gitlinks with the real trees.
Also untrack .env (it carried placeholder secrets) in favour of a tracked
.env.example, drop the committed __pycache__, and narrow the blanket *.png
ignore that would have swallowed design assets.
stroblme
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