Cloud Foundry Node-RED Buildpack

Current architecture of Node-RED on IBM Bluemix

Single Node-RED instance has two roles, both development environment(Editor) and flow execution environment(Runtime). Therefore developer and application users should access to single Node-RED instance. This architecture will be useful for PoC because developer easily modify the flow when users found bug or improvement idea. But it is rare architecture in terms of Cloud Foundry application.

General deployment of application on Cloud Foundry

In general, developer creates their code on local PC. After the coding, he/she deploy it into Cloud Foundry using cf push command. The following diagram shows an example of PHP application development.

Deployment of Node-RED flow file using Node-RED buildpack

Node-RED buildpack realizes common style of application development. After developer creates flow on local Node-RED environment, they can deploy it into Cloud Foundry. In detail, cf push command send only flow file. After that, Cloud Foundry builds Node-RED instance from the flow file using Node-RED buildpack. Node-RED buildpack will be useful for Blue-green deployment and scaling instances.

How to deploy

(1) Login to Cloud Foundry

cf login -a <Cloud_Foundry_endpoint>

(2) Deploy flow using Node-RED buildpack

cf push <application_name> -p <node-red_directory> -b https://github.com/zuhito/node-red-buildpack.git

How to create flow on Windows and deploy it to Bluemix

(1) Start Node-RED on local Windows PC

node-red

(2) Create flow and hit deploy(Save flow into the following path automatically)

C:\Users\<user_name>\.node-red\flows_<host_name>.json

(3) Login to Bluemix

cf login -a api.ng.bluemix.net

(4) Deploy flow using Node-RED buildpack

cd C:\Users\<user_name>\

cf push <application_name> -p .node-red -b https://github.com/zuhito/node-red-buildpack.git