FlowFuse v1.4 with device provisioning in bulk and staged development process

Our second release of 2023 with some great new features to try out.

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Deploy Node-RED to many devices quickly, and allow a staged development process with the latest release of FlowFuse v1.4.

Keep reading for the details of what's in this release or you can watch our 1 minute roundup video of the new release above.

To make it easy for everyone to experience FlowFuse, we are introducing a new free 30-day trial. You can now experience the power of using FlowFuse to quickly deliver Node-RED applications in a reliable, repeatable, collaborative, and secure manner. To get your free trial simply sign up for FlowFuse Cloud; no credit card is required!

#  New User Features

Automatic Device Provisioning

Most prominently, FlowFuse 1.4 features automatic device onboarding for fleets. Simply download a FlowFuse device provisioning credential to allow quick roll-out to a whole fleet, without the need to have device specific configuration. When the agent starts, the FlowFuse agent and the Node-RED snapshot will automatically be provisioned to the device and start operations. Issue #1212

Support for Staged Development

A new feature of 1.4 is the ability to setup staged deployments. This makes it possible to simply move a project between a Development > Test > Production for your Node-RED application delivery. Issue #1580

#  Improvements

  • It's now much easier to change the resources available to your Node-RED instance. With a few clicks a resource intensive workload can be processed faster by changing between small, medium, or large instance types. #595

  • Last release allows users to capture flows in a shared library to reuse in another flow, now it's possible to preview the stored flows. #1657

  • Add a synchronous mode for the FlowFuse persisted context store, next to the asynchronous mode already available. #17

  • Add a Last Seen status for devices connecting to FlowFuse. #1599

  • Added a check to ensure the team slug is unique. #1609

  • Optionally set snapshot as target at creation, to quickly roll out changes to remote deployments #1527

  • Agents are more rugged when starting up if they're unable to connect to FlowFuse, and will retry to connect.

  • With FlowFuse v1.4 some changes were made under the hood to speed up the recovery of Node-RED instances. On terminal failures of an instance it will now be automatically be redeployed with the correct flows. This uses Kubernetes features and is also available if you've installed through kubernetes. To migrate the old style of deployments to this system a restart or stack upgrade is needed.

#  Bug Fixes

We've fixed the following bugs in this release.

  • Deleting your only team, doesn't exit from the team UI. #1630
  • Async Team Slug Check. #1609
  • Improve communication of Device Last Seen and Status #1599

#  Contributors

We'd like the thank the following for their contributions to this release:

As an open-source project, we welcome community involvement in what we're building. If you're interested in contributing, checkout our guide in the docs.

#  Try it out

We're confident you can have self managed FlowFuse running locally in under 30 minutes. You can install our local build, use Docker, or Kubernetes.

If you'd rather use our hosted offering: Get started for free on FlowFuse Cloud.

#  Upgrading FlowFuse

FlowFuse Cloud is already running 1.4.

If you installed a previous version of FlowFuse and want to upgrade, our documentation provides a guide for upgrading your FlowFuse instance.

#  Getting help

Please check FlowFuse's documentation as the answers to many questions are covered there.

If you hit any problems with the platform please raise an issue on GitHub. That's also a great place to send us any feedback or feature requests.

You can also get help on the Node-RED forums

As well as in the forum within our Github project

Chat with us on the #flowfuse channel on the Node-RED Slack workspace

You can raise a support ticket by emailing support@flowfuse.com

We've also added a live chat widget to our website, you can access it using the icon on the bottom right corner of our website. We'd love to hear from you.

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