AppBuilder

You've built the workflow. Now the hard part: handing it to someone who will never, ever open ComfyUI. That's the entire pitch of the AppBuilder node from lihaoyun6's PowerPanel pack. Drop it into any workflow, click the ⚙️ Configure Panel button, pick which knobs to expose, and the workflow becomes a web app - a clean page with only the fields you chose, runnable from a laptop or a phone. The README says it in one line: "Turn your workflow into an easy-to-use web application without enabling Node2.0."

That last clause is the interesting bit. Comfy Org shipped its own native App Mode and App Builder in 2026, but it's tied to the newer node system. This pack is the DIY route that works on the classic canvas, self-hosted, no cloud account, no per-generation bill. If you've ever explained to a client that "you just need to install ComfyUI, load this JSON, and open the queue," you already know why this exists.

How it works

The node itself is nearly empty Python - main() returns nothing. All the magic lives in the frontend. The only real input is config_json, a STRING that holds the app's widget layout as JSON. On the canvas the pack hides that field and gives the node its personality: 📱 Open in AppView, ⚙️ Configure Panel, Auto Launch and Short Title toggles, plus a bypasser_1 input that AppBuilderBypasser nodes plug into.

The ⚙️ panel is where you build the UI. It can add text fields, sliders, seeds, toggles, dropdowns, image uploaders, bypass switches, and LoRA stacks. Everything you add gets serialized back into config_json, so the app layout travels inside the workflow JSON itself. The single output is any - a placeholder. Don't wire it. If you need the app's values to actually drive the graph, use AppBuilderAdv plus ParametersUnpacker instead.

Install

ComfyUI Manager, or by hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lihaoyun6/ComfyUI-PowerPanel

Then restart ComfyUI. Dependencies are just pynvml and psutil (used for the system-stats panel in the app view) and they install automatically - no model downloads, nothing heavy. One naming trap: the README and pyproject still call the repo "ComfyUI-AppBuilder"; lihaoyun6 renamed it and the docs lag behind. In Manager, search "PowerPanel". If you get "AppBuilder" from a cached registry, that's the same pack.

Phone usage and the app folder

To make your apps show up on your phone, save the configured workflows under a subfolder named app inside your workflows directory (the pack uses ComfyUI/user/default/workflows/app). When you open ComfyUI from a phone, the App Manager lists them. This is the author's whole vision: you build once, hand someone a URL on your LAN, done.

Common issues

The big one to know before you start: only one AppBuilder-family node is allowed per workflow. Add a second one and the pack auto-removes it with a warning toast. If a workflow seems to "lose" your AppBuilderAdv, that's why. Also don't confuse this pack with Comfy Org's official App Mode when searching for help - most "AppBuilder" threads on Reddit are about the native feature, not this pack, which is quiet in the community despite being well-built. Same author as FlashVSR_Ultra_Fast, incidentally - lihaoyun6 knows their way around ComfyUI plumbing.