🕒Show Clock in CMD console-SG

The first honest thing to say about "Show Clock in CMD Console SG" is that the name undersells the actual trick. This isn't a node you drag into a graph. It's a startup hook that quietly rewrites how ComfyUI's server reports progress to your terminal, so every job - start, finish, failure, interruption - gets a timestamped, color-coded line. You install it once, restart, and your console stops being a wall of unlabeled "Prompt executed" spam and starts being a log you can actually read.

Where it shines is queue work. If you batch a dozen jobs overnight and want to know which one was the 2:14 AM generation that died, this is exactly the tool. It's also handy if you're mid-queue and need to tell whether a long render is still chewing or has silently wedged - the "Processing Begins..." timestamp gives you a baseline to compare against.

How it actually works

Here's the part that makes this pack interesting (and a little brave). On import, the module fires up a background thread that retries hooking into ComfyUI's PromptServer.instance.send_sync method. Once it latches on, it watches for four server events:

• execution_start - prints a cyan "Processing Begins..." line and starts a timer
• execution_success - green line with total time in minutes and seconds
• execution_error - red line, same timing
• execution_interrupted - orange line, whether you hit the button or Ctrl+C

It also installs a logging interceptor that prints its own "initialized" message right after ComfyUI's "To see the GUI go to:" line, so you get visible confirmation on every boot that the hook attached. That's the nice touch - it fails loudly instead of silently.

Why "a little brave"? This is monkey-patching internal server methods, so a ComfyUI update that changes send_sync's signature can break it. The retry loop (10 attempts with backoff) handles the startup race where the server isn't ready yet, but it can't fix an upstream API change. Worst case you'll see the orange "failed to initialize" message and everything else keeps working - it degrades to "no clock," not "broken ComfyUI." Given ComfyUI's ecosystem-wide habit of breaking third-party packs with frontend rewrites (ask anyone running rgthree after the Nodes 2.0 rollout), the graceful fallback is a real plus.

The node itself (yes, it's a pass-through)

If you search the node list you'll find ShowClockinCMDconsoleSG with one required input, image (an IMAGE tensor), and one output, also image. It returns the image completely unchanged. No processing, no side effects.

That's not a bug. The node exists so the pack has something to register - the real work all happens at startup, whether or not this node is in any workflow. The README is explicit about this: it eliminates the need to add a node to every workflow. So if you're staring at it wondering what to wire into the image input: nothing. You can ignore it entirely, or drop it into a workflow as a harmless pass-through if having it on the canvas reassures you.

Install

Two options, both trivial. The pack has zero dependencies - no requirements.txt, no models to download - which is genuinely refreshing in an ecosystem where dependency conflicts are the number-one complaint.

With ComfyUI Manager: open Manager → Custom Nodes Manager, search ComfyUI-Show-Clock-in-CMD-Console-SG, install, restart.

Without Manager, from your ComfyUI/custom_nodes directory:

git clone https://github.com/ShammiG/ComfyUI-Show-Clock-in-CMD-Console-SG.git

Then restart ComfyUI. On startup you should see the clock's initialized message under the server address.

Where people get tripped up

• You must restart. If you're expecting the message to appear after a hot reload without a full restart, you'll be confused. The hook installs during module import at boot.
• Watch for the retry lines. If you ever see "startup attempt 1/10" scrolling, the hook couldn't grab the server in time - usually harmless (it usually succeeds on a later attempt), but if it ends in "failed to initialize," your ComfyUI version likely changed the internal API. Update the pack or wait for the author.
• It's global by design. Every job logs, which is the point - but it also means heavy queue work spams your console with clock lines. That's why the same author shipped a separate, per-workflow VAE-timestamp variant: this one is the "log everything" option, not the "quiet" one.
• A word on trust: any node that runs code at startup is running code with full access to your machine, and custom nodes have no sandbox. This one's a tiny, reviewable logging hook (I read the whole source - it's ~200 lines, no network calls), but it's a good habit to glance at any pack's source before installing one that auto-initializes.

Small, honest, and it does exactly one thing well. If you live in the ComfyUI terminal, it's worth the two minutes.