🎨 Easy Checkpoint Config Loader

You know the ritual. You swap an SDXL checkpoint for a Flux one, forget that Flux wants four steps and a CFG barely above 1.0, and the sampler dutifully renders a beautiful canvas of deep-fried static noise. The Easy Checkpoint Config Loader exists to make that specific mistake impossible.

It's from Comfy Cabinet, a small pack that ships a handful of "Easy" nodes plus a web dashboard to configure them. The pitch is dead simple: instead of hardcoding steps, CFG, sampler and scheduler on your KSampler and re-tuning them every time you switch models, you save those settings once per checkpoint, and this node hands them to the sampler. The README frames it as a "polite, highly organized butler inside your ComfyUI instance," which is over-egging it, but the mechanic is real and genuinely useful.

How it works

Under the hood it's a normal checkpoint loader wearing a settings layer. The node calls ComfyUI's own CheckpointLoaderSimple.load_checkpoint() to get your MODEL, CLIP and VAE, then pulls a saved config out of a local SQLite database (checkpoint_configs.db, in custom_nodes/Comfy-Cabinet/) keyed by the exact checkpoint filename.

That saved config is what makes it interesting:

• Sampler settings - steps, CFG, sampler name, scheduler. Unconfigured checkpoints fall back to global defaults of 20 steps, 7.0 CFG, euler/normal, matching plain vanilla ComfyUI.
• Prompt stitching - optional prefix and suffix (think masterpiece, highly detailed and , 4k, sharp focus) that get joined around the user_prompt you type into the node. The separator is configurable, and \n becomes a real line break if you like your prompts structured like a grocery list.
• Clip skip - if you saved one below -1, it clones the CLIP and applies it before anything downstream.

The node also forces itself to re-run every execution via IS_CHANGED, so the latest saved config gets picked up without nudging a widget. That bypasses ComfyUI's caching, but for a cheap loader it's the right trade.

The inputs and outputs that matter

You only touch two inputs. checkpoint is the dropdown of your local checkpoints. user_prompt is the multiline text field for the actual thing you're generating - leave it empty and the prefix/suffix alone still produce a prompt.

The outputs are the whole point, all ten of them:

• MODEL, CLIP, VAE - wire these exactly like any checkpoint loader.
• steps (INT), cfg (FLOAT), sampler_name, scheduler - wire these into the corresponding inputs on your KSampler. This replaces the hardcoded numbers, which is the trick the whole node is built around.
• prefix, suffix, final_prompt - final_prompt is prefix + user prompt + suffix joined with your separator; wire it into a CLIPTextEncode, or route the static chunks elsewhere via their own outputs.

Setting it up

Install once, and it covers the whole pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Zed93/Comfy-Cabinet.git

Then restart ComfyUI. It's also findable in ComfyUI Manager by searching "Comfy Cabinet" if you'd rather click than type - though it's a young pack, so if Manager doesn't list it yet, the clone route always works. The only pip dependency is aiohttp>=3.8.0, which ComfyUI almost certainly already has since its own server runs on it.

The part that takes a minute to notice: configuration happens in a web dashboard, not on the node. The pack injects a purple 🗄️ Easy Config button into ComfyUI's top menu. Click it, pick the Easy Checkpoint Config tool, find your checkpoint, set steps/CFG/sampler/prompt modifiers in the Config tab, hit Save config, then Send to ComfyUI to push it onto the canvas node over a websocket. Do that once per checkpoint and the node just works.

The same dashboard syncs metadata from Civitai - cover images, tags, trigger words, descriptions. That's bring-your-own-key: paste a Civitai API key into the settings (masked in the UI, stored locally) and point it at either civitai.com or civitai.red. No key means no previews, but generation works fine regardless - the sync is a convenience layer, not a dependency.

Where people get burned

The configs are saved under the exact checkpoint filename. Rename or move the file and you've orphaned all your settings - that's the one thing that will actually bite you. Also, don't delete the civitai_cache/ folder in the pack directory: that's where all those preview images live, and nuking it means re-downloading every one of them.

And a reality check: it's a release candidate (v0.2.1 at the time of writing), tested against ComfyUI 0.30.1. Expect the occasional rough edge. If the Easy Config button doesn't appear after a fresh install, the extension didn't load - restart ComfyUI.