This guide walks you through the steps of running Node-RED on an Azure virtual machine instance.
Create a base image
Log in to the Azure console
Click to add a new… virtual machine
In the list of virtual machines, select Ubuntu Server and click Create
Give your machine a name, the username you want to use, and the authentication details you want to use to access the instance
Choose the size of your instance. Keep in mind that node.js is single-threaded, so there is no benefit in choosing a size with multiple cores for a simple node-red instance. A1 Basic is a great starting point
In the Settings step, click on the Network Security Group option. Add a new “Inbound Rule” with options set to:
Name: node-red-editor
Priority: 1010
Protocol:TCP
Destination port range: 1880
Click OK on the settings page, review the summary, and click OK to deploy the new instance
After a few minutes, your instance will be running.In the console you can find the IP address of your instance
Set Node-RED
The next task is to log into the instance and install node.js and Node-RED.
Log in to 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_12.x | sudo -E bash –
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs build-essential
sudo npm install -g -unsafe-perm node-red
At this point, you can test your instance by running node-red. NOTE: You may receive some errors regarding serial nodes – this is expected and can be ignored.
Once started, you can log in at http://
To have Node-RED start automatically when your instance restarts, you can use pm2:
sudo npm install -g –unsafe-perm pm2
pm2 start `which node-red` — -v
pm2 save
pm2 startup
NOTE: This last command will prompt you to run another command – make sure you do what it says.
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