Repeat Group State

Repeat Group State is a connection-free control node that makes one group of nodes mirror the on/off state of other groups. You drop it inside a group, give it a substring, and from then on: if any group whose name contains that substring is active, your group gets enabled; if all the matching groups are disabled, your group gets muted. The author describes it as "similar to rgthree repeaters" - and that's exactly the mental model. A repeater lets one part of the graph follow another without wires; this does it at the group level instead of the node level.

Where you reach for it: a large workflow where you have feature groups that only make sense together. Say you have a "ControlNet" group, a "Detailer" group, and a "Post" group, and every time you disable ControlNet you also want the Detailer and Post groups to shut down so you don't waste a queue processing dead branches. Drop a Repeat Group State with group_name_contains set to "ControlNet" inside each dependent group, and muting the master group silently mutes the dependents. That's the whole point - fewer things to remember to click.

How it works. The heavy lifting is in the bundled JavaScript. An extension scans the graph, finds groups whose titles contain your substring, checks whether any node inside any of them is active (not muted or bypassed), and then sets every node inside the repeater's own group to active or muted accordingly. It does this both when you queue a run and on a lightweight poll every 100 ms, so the state stays in sync while you're editing.

The one input. group_name_contains, a substring. And that's everything - there are no outputs. This is a side-effect node: its job is done by mutating the graph, not by producing data. Nothing to wire, nothing to read.

How to install. ComfyUI Manager (search "AK Pack") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/akawana/ComfyUI-Utils-extra

Restart ComfyUI. No dependencies, no models.

Where people get burned. Three things. First, it's entirely frontend-driven - the polling and mode-setting live in the browser JS, so a headless API run won't keep the groups synced. Second, substring matching is loose and loops are possible: if two repeaters reference each other's groups, they'll fight over who sets whose mode every poll. Keep your substrings directional - one master group, several dependents. Third, remember it only acts when it's inside a group. Place it on the bare canvas and there's nothing to sync - it just sits there doing nothing, which is confusing until you realize the group membership is the whole mechanism.