At long last, Node-RED 0.18 is now available to download or npm install.

If upgrading, please read the upgrade instructions.

For the Raspberry Pi users, please see the Raspberry Pi documentation for how to upgrade if you are still on the pre-installed version.

We published our roadmap to 1.0 last July and with it said:

You’ll note that there are not committed timescales on this roadmap; it represents a lot of development work and there are still unanswered questions on the final designs. But our intention is to get to 1.0 by the end of the year.

Here we are at the end of January and this is our first release since then and it isn’t 1.0. We had hoped to be further along the roadmap than we are, but some things just can’t be rushed.

As an open source project we rely on our excellent community to help drive things forward. One of our goals for this year is to grow the contributor community. Contributing to the project doesn’t just mean writing lines of code (although, of course, that does help speed the roadmap along). There are many ways to get more involved and give back to the project, such as documentation, the cookbook or helping improving the flow library.

If you want to get involved, come chat to us on Slack.

But now, on with the 0.18 release notes.

Projects

The new Projects feature is the first major step on our roadmap to 1.0. It changes how you manage your flow files and introduces version control into the editor.

Rather than go over it all here, we’ve added some documentation that explains more about the Projects feature, or you can watch this video:

We’re easing this feature out, so for this release it is in preview mode - you need to enable it via your settings file. That means you can opt-in to moving over to projects before we turn it on by default in a future release.

Message Sequence nodes

We introduced the Split/Join node pair in a previous release. These nodes can be used to turn a single message into a sequence of messages and back again.

With this release we are adding some more features around message sequences.

  • the Switch node has some new rules for routing messages based on their position within a sequence
  • the Join node can be configured with a JSONata expression for reducing a sequence to a single message
  • a new Sort node has been added for reordering the messages in a sequence
  • a new Batch node has been aded for creating new sequences from the messages it receives.
  • both the CSV and File In nodes, when sending multiple messages, send them as properly formed message sequences. This allows you to more efficiently stream large CSV files through a flow.

For example, given a stream of sensor data coming from an MQTT node, the Batch node can be used to create time-sliced sequences which the Join node reduces to calculate the average sensor reading within each time-slice.

Customising a node’s icon

We’ve added the ability to change a node’s icon. This can be helpful where you have lots of the same node type on a flow and you want to help distinguish them. Note this is an editor customisation - you cannot change the icon dynamically from a flow.

To change the icon, open the settings section of a node’s edit dialog and you’ll see the new options beneath the port labels settings. With this release you have to pick from the list of available icons, but we’ll be expanding on that in the future.

Support for scoped modules

We recently updated the Flow Library to index scoped node modules. With this release we’ve squashed a few bugs so you can now also install them directly from within the Palette Editor.

Increased flexibility with core nodes

By convention, nodes use msg.payload as the main property they work with. This is how many nodes are able to just work together, but it can also cause problems where a flow has to juggle its properties around to get the right thing into the payload at any given point.

Some nodes are already more flexible than others and let you pick a different property to work with. We’ve now extended that to more nodes.

In the core palette, the range, HTML, JSON and XML nodes have all been updated, as have the extra nodes RBE, random, smooth and base64 - look-out for new versions of their modules.

Update to JSONata 1.5.0

We’ve updated to the latest release of JSONata which introduces some new functions and capabilities. Check their release notes for more information on both the 1.4.0 and 1.5.0 releases.

Node Updates

As usual, there’s a long list of improvements across a wide range of the core nodes.

  • the JSON node can now be configured to enforce a particular encoding, rather than always toggling between JSON and JavaScript Object. This is useful, for example, when you have an http endpoint that is expecting the user to send JSON. The HTTP In node will only automatically parse the JSON if the request had its Content-type properly set - and in the real world, that’s the type of thing that users get wrong. Adding this mode to the JSON node allows such a flow to be more forgiving and guarantee the message payload has been parsed.

  • The common TLS config node allows you to specify a passphrase for your private key file.

  • Speaking of TLS, we’ve added TLS support to the WebSocket Client node.

  • Speaking of WebSockets, we’ve added WebSocket support to the MQTT nodes.

  • The template node, which can already send parsed JSON rather than text, can now also send parsed YAML. You can also use msg.template to dynamically set the template it uses.

  • Speaking of YAML, there’s a new YAML parser node for converting to and from that format.

  • The Delay node can now be reset by sending it a message with a msg.reset property, discarding any queued up messages.

  • The Debug node now lets you update its status text with the content of messages it receives. Useful for providing a quick-glance view of your flow’s state.

  • The Inject node now lets you specify a delay before its ‘inject once on start’ option is triggered.

  • The Trigger node can now be configured to use msg.topic to distinguish different streams of messages to trigger against.