CoachBate File Exists

Some nodes are infrastructure, not features. CoachBate File Exists is a one-job predicate: give it a path, get a boolean back. It's the kind of tiny utility you don't think about until you need it - then you need it constantly. In the pack's own production flow, something like this is what decides whether a start-frame image actually exists before you wire it into LTX conditioning, or whether a branch should run at all.

How it works

You feed it a path (STRING) and it returns True or False for whether that path points to an existing file. A few smart details under the hood: matching outer quotes are stripped, which matters because Windows paths with spaces are commonly passed around quoted; ~ and environment variables get expanded; and an empty path returns False rather than erroring.

One gotcha to internalize: it checks os.path.isfile, not "does this path exist." A folder returns False. That's usually what you want in a pipeline ("do we have the conditioning image?"), but don't use it to test directories.

Inputs and output

• path - the file path to test. That's it; that's the whole input.
• exists (BOOLEAN) - True if it's a real file, False otherwise.

What you'd wire it into

ComfyUI doesn't have a native if statement, but it has switches and conditionals that take a boolean. The classic pattern: a node produces a path (a Shot Loader outputting a start_image, a folder walker, a model path resolver), and you want to branch on whether that file is actually there. Feed exists into a switch or conditional node to pick between "condition on the image" and "skip the image." Or run it on a model path to decide between two LoRA loaders. It's a predicate - the interesting part is what you do with the answer.

There's no forceInput magic here, but the path field accepts a wired input, so a path generated elsewhere in the graph flows straight in.

Common issues

• Folder returns False - expected; it's isfile, not isdir. Test files, not directories.
• False on a valid file - the path resolves relative to wherever ComfyUI's server runs, not your browser. Use an absolute path, or remember remote/cloud setups see the server's filesystem, not yours.
• Quoted paths - matching outer quotes are fine (stripped automatically); an unpaired quote isn't.

Installation

Install via ComfyUI Manager (search "CoachBate") or:

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

Restart ComfyUI; it appears under CoachBate → Utils in Add Node. No dependencies, no downloads - it's a handful of lines of Python. Alpha-stage pack, but there's very little here that can break.