Model List (ComfyUI Deploy)

Straight answer before anything else: this node doesn't exist anymore. ComfyUIDeployModelList lived in the ComfyUI Deploy pack for about six months, and the author deleted it in April 2025 because it could crash ComfyUI on startup. If you found it through comfy.icu or in a workflow you downloaded, that's a ghost from an old version - and knowing why it died tells you a lot about how this pack's external-input nodes work.

What it was for

ComfyUI Deploy (the pack behind comfydeploy.com, a "Vercel for generative workflows") works by turning parts of your graph into API inputs. The surviving ComfyUIDeployExternal* nodes each expose one parameter a remote caller can set. ModelList was the odd one out: instead of an input a caller could fill in, it scanned your entire models/ folder and gave you a dropdown of every model file it found - checkpoints, LoRAs, .pth, .onnx, whatever - then output the filename of the one you picked.

The mechanism was brute-force simple. At import time it recursively walked ./models, collected every file ending in .safetensors, .ckpt, .pth, .pkl or .onnx, and turned that list into the dropdown. Its single input, model, was that list; its single output, model, was the bare filename (path stripped down to the last segment) so you could feed it straight into a checkpoint loader.

Why it got removed

The commit message tells the whole story: "created just for an experiment... never was a core feature." The recursive walk returned None for empty directories, and because the list was computed at module import, that error took down the entire comfyui-deploy custom node import - meaning your whole machine failed to boot the pack, not just the one node. It also had the classic import-time-list bug: add a model after ComfyUI starts and the dropdown was already stale.

So if a workflow you grabbed references ComfyUIDeployModelList, ComfyUI will complain the node is missing. Don't hunt for a way back - replace it with the pack's current External Checkpoint or External Lora nodes, which do the same job without scanning a directory at import. The node is a good example of why ComfyUI's custom-node model has no safety net: a single bad line in any pack can brick startup for everyone who installed it, which is exactly the failure mode the ecosystem essay on ComfyUI warns about.

The takeaway

There's nothing to install or configure here. If you're new to ComfyUI Deploy, skip ModelList entirely and start with the External Text, External Seed, and slider nodes - those are the ones still alive. Treat this comfy.icu page as a tombstone and a lesson: check whether a node your downloaded workflow references still exists before you chase the error.