Local Stacks

A Stack defines a set of platform configuration options that will get applied to each Node-RED instance when it is created.

For the Local deployment model, this covers two things:

  • memory - the value to apply (in MB) to the Node.js max-old-space-size option. This defines the point where Node.js will start freeing unused memory. It is not a hard limit - Node-RED's memory usage will not be capped - but this is useful when running on a memory constrained device such as a Raspberry Pi. Recommended minimum 256.
  • nodered - the version number of Node-RED to use. This should match the value used in the steps following.

The FlowFuse installer will create a default stack using the latest stable release of Node-RED.

The stacks are stored under /opt/flowforge/var/stacks or c:\flowforge\var\stacks on Windows.

Creating a Stack

When a new version of Node-RED is released, it can be added to your FlowFuse platform by creating a new stack.

For a local install there are two steps required:

  1. Install a new Node-RED version

    In the FlowFuse Home directory, run the provided install script. You must provide the full Node-RED version number, eg 3.0.2, or use latest to install the most recent stable version.

    Linux/Mac:

    cd /opt/flowforge
    ./bin/ff-install-stack.sh 3.0.2

    Windows

    cd c:\flowforge
    bin\ff-install-stack.bat 3.0.2
  2. Add the Stack into the FlowFuse Admin UI - see Managing Stacks.

Development Only

If you are developing FlowFuse having checked it out from GitHub then you can run the following command in the repository root to install a stack:

npm run install-stack --vers=3.0.2