MiniMax Ref Ext Manager

MiniMax Ref Ext Manager looks like a mistake the first time you see it. Zero inputs, zero outputs, nothing to wire, and a button squatting in the middle of the node body. That's not a bug. It's the entire point: this node is a launcher for a workflow-dependency manager, added in v3.1.9 of the MiniMaxRefDirector-ComfyUI pack. It sits on your canvas so that when you load someone's H3 Director workflow and ComfyUI helpfully lists eleven missing custom nodes, there's a fix button already in front of you instead of a trip to the terminal.

Context matters here. The Director pack is the "director-style" multi-shot storyboard workflow for MiniMax H3 reference-to-video - timeline editor, VLM-written shot prompts, a hybrid fl2va/ref2va loader. Workflows that ambitious drag in a pile of companions: Easy-Use for the loop, seitanism's H3-Motion-Context-MultiRef, Context-Noise, a VLM backend, plus checkpoints and LoRAs. That's the ecosystem's biggest real-world complaint in a nutshell - you download a workflow, then spend the afternoon installing what it references. This node is one pack author's attempt to make that afternoon shorter.

How it works

Click the button and a draggable, resizable panel opens. The frontend walks the currently open graph, collects every node class and model reference, and POSTs them to the backend routes the pack mounts under /minimax_ref/api/ext/*. The backend then does the actual triage in ext_mgmt.py:

• Plugins. It enumerates custom_nodes/, figures out which directory each class in your graph belongs to, and flags the ones marked "used by this workflow." Git-hosted plugins get a one-click git pull to update.
• Missing plugins. Classes in your graph with no local owner get candidate repos. Candidates come from ComfyUI-Manager's own database (custom-node-list.json plus node_db/*) - lazily read and cached - and from a hard-coded alias table for the known H3 ecosystem repos, so MultiRef and Context-Noise resolve even when Manager's db hasn't caught up. One click runs git clone --depth 1.
• Models. References are grouped by type - LoRAs, checkpoints, diffusion models, UNet, VAE - and matched against your models/<type> folders three ways: full path, filename, or extension-stripped stem. Anything missing can be pulled from ModelScope: paste an owner/name or a model page link, the node lists the repo's files via ModelScope's API, you pick one, and it streams down to the right folder.
• A soft restart button, because every install and update above only takes effect after ComfyUI restarts. The panel tracks that pending-restart state so you're not guessing.

Since the node has no inputs or outputs, it never executes in a queue run - Queue ignores it entirely, which is the correct behavior for a tool that should be invisible during generation.

What you actually do with it

Add the node to any workflow that uses this pack's ecosystem (or just any workflow with missing nodes), click the button, and read the panel. The three things that matter:

• Used vs. missing - if the tab shows a plugin marked "workflow uses this" and you're the one who cloned it, don't update it mid-project; pulls can move the goalposts on a workflow you've got working.
• The ModelScope IDs - a bare name like "mystic" won't resolve. The panel needs owner/name or the full model page URL, and it'll tell you so.
• The restart button - use it, don't just close the panel, or your shiny new clone won't load until you manually restart anyway.

Install

It ships inside the whole pack, so install the pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/eaglering/MiniMaxRefDirector-ComfyUI
cd MiniMaxRefDirector-ComfyUI
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then restart ComfyUI (and Ctrl+F5 to clear cached frontend JS - the manager panel is frontend code, so a stale browser tab will show a node with no button). Or just search "MiniMaxRefDirector" in ComfyUI Manager. The README claims av is the only extra Python dependency, but the actual requirements.txt also pulls in soundfile>=0.12.1 for audio serialization - the README lies, the file doesn't. It's a small lie; both are pip-installable and unrelated to this node.

Where people get burned

If you don't have ComfyUI-Manager installed, the missing-plugin tab comes back empty - this node borrows Manager's repo database rather than maintaining its own, though the hard-coded H3 aliases and all model-download functionality still work. And remember the node's job is diagnosis, not magic: it can tell you a workflow needs ComfyUI-H3-Motion-Context-MultiRef and install it, but it can't decide which of two versions of a LoRA is the one the author used. That last mile is still on you.