node-red static directory

This weekend I updated to node-red 0.10.4 which has a major change: the userDir where all the user files are stored is now outside of the node-red install dir, by default being the $HOME/.node-red dir (you can override it with the --userDir option). The steps to upgrade are documented really well here. Another big change is that the way to update using git pull is not recommended any more, instead the preferred way being

    sudo npm install -g node-red

This installs node-red in /usr/local/lib/node_modules/node-red which is accessible to the root user but it should really not be used to store user files. And there is really no reason to do so: the extra nodes can be installed directly in the userDir location, the flows and .config.js are saved there as well, settings.js is read from this directory if present, also flows exported to the library are stored here too. There is only one thing that seems it needs to go in the node-red install dir: static files.

For example, in my case, I have a flow that responds to URLs like /books/:type/:topic/:genre/:num and in order to not have to fill in the type, topic, genre and num params every time, I created a simple HTML page saved in /public/books/index.html that sends various values for these params. Now that node-red is separating the user content from the actual node-red content, I would like this page to be in userDir as well. So I started going through the configuration docs trying to figure out how to do it. At first glance, at least the way I read those docs the only way to do so is to use the httpStatic property; the problem is the docs say "When this property is used, httpAdminRoot must also be used to make editor UI available at a path other than /." I tried to change both httpStatic and httpAdminRoot and couldn't find a good solution until I decided to leave httpAdminRoot unchanged and just set httpStatic to /home/pi/.node-red/public and it worked. So now I have index.html in .node-red/public/books that loads in the browser as expected at http://<node-red ip>:1880/books/ while the actual <node-red install dir>/public dir is unchanged and the editor still works at http://<node-red ip>:1880

I thought this was a problem in the docs but according to Nick the docs are just trying to prevent possible problems so this worked all along. In any case, this is not a big deal in itself but it took me a while to figure it out so I want to document it, to remember it later.