📂 Model Directory (dropdown)

Plenty of ComfyUI nodes - especially in 3D and custom pipelines - take a directory as a hand-typed STRING. ckpt_root, model_root, weights_dir. It's the worst kind of widget: absolute, long, and different on every machine, so shared workflows ship with someone else's /mnt/data/... path baked in. TypedModelDir turns that into a name you pick and an environment variable you set once.

What it does

You choose a root key - anigen, trellis, somax, or custom - and the node resolves that to an actual directory on your disk and emits it as a STRING. Wire the output into whatever node wants a root path. The point is that the workflow no longer contains a machine-specific path: it contains the word anigen, and your install decides what that means.

How it works

Resolution is a two-step fallback. For a non-custom key, the node reads the environment variable MODEL_ROOT_<KEY> in uppercase - MODEL_ROOT_ANIGEN, MODEL_ROOT_TRELLIS, MODEL_ROOT_SOMAX. If it's set and non-empty, that's your root. If it isn't, the node falls back to whatever you put in the custom_root field. If the resolved path doesn't exist or isn't a directory, it raises rather than handing a broken path downstream - an error at this node is much better than a confusing failure five nodes later.

Set the variables wherever ComfyUI gets its environment - in the launcher script, the systemd unit, the Docker -e flags, or the ENV block of your container build. One line each and you're done for every workflow you'll ever load. This is the pattern ComfyUI itself uses for HF_HOME and friends, and it's the one worth adopting: machine-specific config lives in the environment, not in the graph.

Inputs and output

root_key - the dropdown: anigen, trellis, somax, custom. "Which model root am I browsing." There's no filesystem scan behind this one, so there's no placeholder row and no refresh needed; the choices are baked into the node.

custom_root - an explicit path, used when root_key is custom or when the matching env var isn't set. It's declared as a forced input in the source, meaning it's a socket, not a text box: you wire a string into it (a Primitive/string node, or another node's output). That's slightly awkward if all you wanted was to type a path - see below.

directory - a STRING, the resolved root. Wire it into the downstream node's path input.

One clarification the pack's own blurb gets wrong: the module docstring describes this node as listing subdirectories as a dropdown. It doesn't - the shipped code resolves a root and returns the root itself, and the only dropdown is the four root keys. Read the schema, not the prose.

Installing it

cd /path/to/ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/JayDataEngineer/melite-utility-nodes.git

Restart ComfyUI, then search Melite Utility Nodes in ComfyUI Manager if you'd rather not clone. The pack's dependencies (matplotlib, av) are for its plot and media-decode nodes; this picker needs neither.

No models are downloaded by this pack, ever. It's a path resolver - you install the models yourself and tell it where they live.

Where it bites

• custom with nothing wired resolves to an empty string, and you get "model root not found or not a directory: ". Because custom_root is a forced input, you can't just click and type - drop a string primitive on it (or use one of the fixed keys plus an env var, which is the cleaner habit anyway).
• The env var wins over custom_root. If MODEL_ROOT_TRELLIS is set, whatever you wire into custom_root is ignored for that key. That's the intended precedence, but it surprises people who set an env var months ago and forgot.
• It returns the root, not a subdirectory. If your downstream node wants <root>/variant-a specifically, this node alone doesn't get you there. That's what the pack's per-family pickers (Kimodo, HY-Motion, See-Through) are for - they enumerate the subdirectories of their own root and hand back the one you picked.
• It changes when the root's mtime changes. Adding or removing a directory under the root invalidates the node, which is right for a directory selector - but it also means a busy scratch root keeps the node dirty.
• Nothing here validates what's in the directory. You'll get a path to an empty folder just as happily. The failure surfaces at the loader that actually reads it.