Running on Microsoft Azure

This guide takes you through the steps to get Node-RED running on an Azure Virtual Machine instance.

Create the base image

1. Log in to the Azure console

2. Click to add a New … Virtual Machine

3. In the list of Virtual Machines, select Ubuntu Server, then click ‘Create’

4. Give your machine a name, the username you want to use and the authentication details you want to use to access the instance

5. Choose the Size of your instance. Remember that node.js is single-threaded so there’s no benefit to picking a size with multiple cores for a simple node-red instance. A1 Basic is a good starting point

6. On the ‘Settings’ step, click on the ‘Network security group’ option. Add a new ‘Inbound rule’ with the options set as:
   • Name: node-red-editor
   • Priority: 1010
   • Protocol: TCP
   • Destination port range: 1880
7. Click ‘Ok’ on the Settings page, check the Summary then click ‘Ok’ to deploy the new instance

After a couple of minutes your instance will be running. In the console you can find your instance’s IP address

Setup Node-RED

The next task is to log into the instance then install node.js and Node-RED.

Log into your instance using the authentication details you specified in the previous stage.

Once logged in you need to install node.js and Node-RED

   curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | sudo -E bash -
   sudo apt-get install -y nodejs build-essential
   sudo npm install -g node-red

At this point you can test your instance by running node-red. Note: you may get some errors regarding the Serial node - that’s to be expected and can be ignored.

Once started, you can access the editor at http://<your-instance-ip>:1880/.

To get Node-RED to start automatically whenever your instance is restarted, you can use pm2:

   sudo npm install -g pm2
   pm2 start `which node-red` -- -v
   pm2 save
   pm2 startup

Note: this final command will prompt you to run a further command - make sure you do as it says.