Unfortunately that config file is mysterious. It has been deprecated in node-red but the conduit is stuck on an old version, so it’s hard to understand how it’s supposed to work.
A couple of things to check:
- What are your .config.json permissions? It’s a long shot, but I guess it needs to be writable by admin. Mine are:
-rw-r--r-- admin root - Have you waited a long time after rebooting? node-red takes many minutes to start. I guess you have if you can see the palette.
- Try watching
/var/log/app/node-red.logas node-red starts. Normally there’s not much to see (only “Loading palette nodes” seems to be relevant) but maybe yours is showing an error. - Try killing Node-RED, and then running it from the command line with
/opt/node-red/bin/node-red-pi. You’ll see a bunch of stuff appear on the command line which may include something useful. - As a last resort, could you try modifying .config.json yourself? It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t seem too hard to guess what should appear in there.
Hopefully something in the logs/command line will help. Might it’s just be a dependancy or a file write issue. It’s tricky to work with though.