Simple Auto Bypass 📚

Bypass a group in ComfyUI and something annoying happens: whatever was flowing through that group - a caption, a conditioning, anything downstream nodes were relying on - comes out as None instead. You disabled a step, but you also broke every node after it that expected real data. Simple Auto Bypass is a small, deliberately narrow fix: route around the disabled group manually, so the rest of the graph keeps working whether that group is on or off.

The author's own framing in the README is refreshingly honest about scope: they built this because they had exactly one recurring case - an LLM group that sometimes generates a caption and sometimes gets switched off - and needed the caption (or the fallback text) to keep flowing either way. They also point out the more famous alternative directly: rgthree-comfy's Any Switch does the same fundamental job with up to six input slots instead of two. If you're already running rgthree (and a lot of people are - its bypass/mute dashboard for whole groups is one of the more commonly reached-for utilities in the ecosystem), you may not need this node at all. If you just want the simplest possible two-input version without pulling in a bigger pack, this is that.

How it works

It's a two-input switch with no logic to configure: if input2 is None (meaning the group feeding it is bypassed or disabled), the node passes input1 through as output. If input2 has a real value (the group is active and produced something), that value passes through instead. Both inputs accept any type - text, image, conditioning, whatever - since the node doesn't inspect the data, only whether it's present.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• input1 - your fallback / main-path value. This is what gets used when the group you're routing around is disabled.
• input2 - the value coming out of the group that might be bypassed. When that group is live, this carries real data; when it's off, this arrives as None.

There's exactly one output, output, and it's whichever of the two inputs was actually valid.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI_SimpleButcher → install → restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/KLL535/ComfyUI_SimpleButcher.git
cd ComfyUI_SimpleButcher
pip install -r requirements.txt

No dependencies to speak of - it's pure graph logic.

Common issues

Place it outside the group you're bypassing, not inside it. This one matters and it's easy to get backwards on a first try: if the Auto Bypass node itself lives inside the group that gets disabled, it gets bypassed along with everything else and has nothing to do. It needs to sit after the group, watching what comes out of it.

You need more than two conditional inputs. This node is deliberately minimal - two in, one out. If you've got a workflow with several groups that might each be independently disabled and need to converge on one output, rgthree's Any Switch (six inputs) is the better fit; reach for that instead of chaining several of these together.

Output stays None even with the group enabled. Double-check the wiring actually runs through the group in question into input2, rather than around it. If input2 is connected to something that was never inside the bypassable group to begin with, this node has nothing meaningful to detect.