Device Agent to scan for local Node-REDs and auto-import

[joepavitt]

Current Migration Path

• Install FlowFuse Device Agent
• Run Device Agent
• Clashes with my existing NR instance
• Kill NR instance
• Run Device Agent
• Go back to FF UI and Enable Developer Mode
• Open Editor
• Realise I can't import my flows easily
• kill Device Agent
• Run Node-RED locally again
• Copy all flows
• Kill Node-RED
• Run Device-Agent
• Go back to FlowFuse UI
• Open Editor
• Paste in Flows
• Deploy
• Create Snapshot

Ideal Scenario

• Run the Device Agent in a "scan" mode (or something like that?)
• Auto detection of flows, and imports

[hardillb]

Suggestion:

• A command line option for the device-agent that you pass a Node-RED userDir path
• If there isn't an existing project for the device agent it will import the flows.json/flows_cred.json and the credentials secret

This makes is a concious choice to import.

[joepavitt]

That could work well. Although, we'd still have the port clash? But less of an issue if you don't need to have the original Node-RED running I guess?

For the options, the vast majority of cases - it'll be in ~./node-red, no? Why not make migrate an option or scan, something like that. With the extra option of userDir for those that aren't using default options?

[hardillb]

Yep, no need for the old version to be running so no port clash.

Having it default to current users home dir + .node-red would be a valid default with an optional path argument.

[hardillb]

Having thought about this while looking at the device agent for the auto start function, this will need some more padding out.

Is only going to apply to an Application bound device agent, but at the point of starting the device agent it doesn't know how it's bound or if it has an existing snapshot to be deployed.

The device agent doesn't even install Node-RED until it has it's first check in and is told to either use the provided snapshot or an empty one. at which point it will install Node-RED and then either download and run the snapshot or deploy a basically empty flow.

It's at the empty flow stage that it should import a provided existing Node-RED flow.