arkennemasis fal · History (free)

The most useful free node in the pack

Every fal node in this pack writes a line to output/fal/_requests.jsonl when it submits, and another when it finishes. This node reads that ledger back. You tell it which run you want, and it loads the files that run already produced - off your own disk, straight into the graph, with no fal call and no new charge.

So the workflow that costs you nothing to run is: change something in your graph, and instead of re-running the paid node to get the same asset again, drop in History, point it at that run, and wire the result onward. The images or video go into your upscaler, your video assembler, your whatever - exactly as if the generator had just fired.

It's also the diagnostic tool. Every fal run is listed with when it ran, which model, the estimate, whether it completed, and how many files came back. When a graph goes wrong at 2am, this is the panel that tells you what actually happened.

Pick and model

Two widgets, both simple:

• pick - which run to load. 0 is the newest, 1 the one before that, and so on. Defaults to 0.
• model - filter the list to one model, or leave it at all models (the default). The dropdown is built from what's in your own ledger, so it fills in as you use the pack.

The node displays the recent runs as a table - time, model, estimate, status, file count - so you can see at a glance which index you want to load.

Outputs

• history - the table as a string, handy if you want to read the ledger in a text node or log it.
• images - IMAGE, for runs that produced pictures.
• video - VIDEO, for runs that produced clips.
• file_paths - the files on disk, as strings.
• run_json - the raw record for the run: request id, endpoint, the estimate, the result payload fal returned.

One run obviously can't be both a picture run and a clip run; you use whichever output your model produces and ignore the other.

How to install (same as the rest of the pack)

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Hishamahmer/comfyui-arkennemasis
pip install -r comfyui-arkennemasis/requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI, then find it under arkennemasis/fal/Tools. If you don't run any fal nodes, the ledger never exists and this node has nothing to show - it's a companion to the paid nodes, not a standalone tool. And unlike its neighbours, it needs no FAL_KEY, because it never talks to fal.

Where people get burned

It reads, it doesn't fetch from fal. History loads files from output/fal/. If you've deleted that folder, cleared your outputs, or moved installs, the run is listed but the picture is gone. The node can't re-download it - that's what fal Recover Result is for, and that one needs the request id.

A run with no files is normal after a crash. If ComfyUI restarted while a job was mid-flight on fal, the ledger has the submit but never got the completion line, so the run shows up with its id and no outputs while the job is still finishing (or has finished) server-side. Paste that id into fal Recover Result and it downloads for free. This is the single best reason the ledger exists: a restart should never mean paying twice.

Reused runs don't clutter the list. When reuse_identical_run returns a cached result instead of calling fal, that's recorded as a reuse and left out of the History table - so the runs you see are the runs you were actually billed for.

It won't tell you what you spent in a month. The ledger is per-request, not an accounting system. It's for finding your render again, not for reconciling fal's invoice.

Credential-adjacent packs deserve a glance. This node is a small, new, single-author add-on - no reputation trail, no community thread history - that parses a local log and imports media. That's benign as these things go, but "new pack, no track record" is exactly the situation where you read the source or at least the node's own description before wiring it into a graph you care about.