Recently while pottering around with Internet of Things (IoT) / home automation I happened across node-red. It appears its basic premise is that it enables IoT integrations – which immediately had me wondering what other types of integrations it could do.
In particular, could it integrate higher level web services and platforms (e.g. Woocommerce, Shopify, Unleashed, Cin7, Xero, etc). From my early testing I’d say the answer is a “qualified” yes. 5 minutes to install (once I had an up-to-date server to play with) and 15 minutes playing with it and I’ve managed to have node-red call the Woocommerce REST API to return an order or a list of products, and I’ve *almost* got it answering a webhook call from Woocommerce (e.g. on order create / update). I say *almost* as it seems Woocommerce webhooks (and seemingly others as well) intentionally don’t work for local addresses or strange ports – which all but rules out testing them on the same machine.
Next I think is to learn about reshaping msg payloads from input to output (e.g. from Woocommerce to Cin7) and passing variables between node stages.