Custom Node Installer

This is ComfyUI Manager's "Install Custom Nodes" button, rebuilt as a node you can drop into a graph. You feed it a GitHub URL, hit Queue, and it clones the repo into ComfyUI/custom_nodes/, runs any setup scripts, and installs the requirements - then tells you to restart.

Honest question first: do you need it? If you're sitting at a normal install with Manager, probably not; the Manager button is two clicks and does the same thing. Where this node earns its keep is automation and fresh machines: a setup workflow you run on a new install, a shared workflow that pulls its own dependencies, or an unattended run. It's a convenience node, and it knows it - the message output even reminds you to restart.

How it works

Under the hood it's a small state machine. It looks at your github_url and decides whether it's a GitHub repository or a direct zip URL:

• Repository → git clone into custom_nodes/ (folder name comes from the repo).
• ZIP file → downloads and extracts it into custom_nodes/<name-from-url>.

Either way it then auto-runs platform setup scripts (install.bat / setup.bat on Windows, .sh on Linux), then installs requirements.txt if one exists. Crucially, it finds the right Python: on Windows portable installs it targets python_embeded\python.exe before falling back to your system Python - which is the classic thing that goes wrong when you install a node with the wrong interpreter and it "works" but won't load.

Two behaviors to know before you run it: it skips silently if a folder with that name already exists, and it only handles public repos - no auth for private ones.

Inputs and outputs

Only two inputs, which is the nice thing about this node:

• github_url - a repo like https://github.com/city96/ComfyUI-GGUF, a raw release zip, or a cdn.comfy.org/.../node.zip file. It detects which kind automatically.
• platform - auto (detect from your OS), or force windows / linux.

Three outputs: status (success/error), installation_path (where it landed), and message (what happened). Like most HMT utils it's an output node - you read it, you don't wire it forward. If you want the full loop, chain it into the pack's ComfyUI Restart node so the server bounces itself when the install finishes.

Install

Same pack, same command as all the HMT nodes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/tuyenhm68/ComfyUI-HMT-Suite.git
cd ComfyUI-HMT-Suite
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then restart and look under HMT Suite > Utils > Custom Node Installer (HMT). ComfyUI Manager (search "ComfyUI-HMT-Suite") works too. Only dependency is requests; it shells out to git, so git must be on your PATH.

The thing to actually worry about

Installing a custom node is running someone's code on your machine with your user account. That's true of Manager and true of this node - the ecosystem's worst incidents (the LLMVISION infostealer, the 2025 registry malware) traveled exactly this path, because nothing sandboxes a node install. Before you point this at an unknown repo, glance at its source. For a repo you already trust, this is a genuinely convenient little node.