ZMongo: Message of the Day

Message of the Day is the ComfyUI-ZMongo node that fetches an announcement from the ZMongo service and shows it on your canvas. It's a news ticker for the pack - infrastructure alerts, changelog notes, cluster status - pulled from https://businessprocessapplications.com/comfy-zmongo/api/motd and broadcast to a small JavaScript panel via ComfyUI's PromptServer.

Here's the honest take: this is not a node you build a workflow around. It's a status widget. If you're using the hosted ZMongo backend, it's a reasonable "is the service telling me anything?" check to drop on a canvas. If you're running local-file-store only, it's mostly pointless - the MOTD comes from their server, and it needs their api_key to fetch it.

It's also the most candid example of what this pack actually is: a set of nodes that talk to a hosted service at businessprocessapplications.com. The MOTD call is exactly one GET request with your key in a ZAI_API_KEY header. Nothing more exotic than that.

How it works

On execution the node makes a GET to /comfy-zmongo/api/motd with your api_key, parses the JSON response, and if it contains a message, returns it plus an expires_at timestamp. It also sends a zmongo.motd_update sync event to the frontend so the pack's JS panel can display the message live. If the request fails or returns nothing, it falls back to a friendly "🌟 Unable to load Message of the Day. Sign in to see updates." string and an empty expires_at - the node refuses to crash your queue over a banner.

It's marked AlwaysDirty like the rest of the pack, so it re-fetches on every execution rather than caching.

Inputs and outputs

A single required input:

• api_key - your ZMongo API key, sent as ZAI_API_KEY.

Two outputs:

• motd_message - the announcement text.
• expires_at - when the message expires, if the server says so.

Wire the message into a text display node if you want it visible, or just let the JS panel handle it.

Installing it

Standard pack install:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/CentralFloridaAttorney/ComfyUI-ZMongo

Restart ComfyUI, or install via ComfyUI Manager ("ComfyUI-ZMongo"). The pack's requirements.txt is heavy for what this node needs - it only really depends on requests, but you get pymongo, langchain, sentence-transformers, transformers, and friends regardless.

Common issues

• Always shows the fallback "Unable to load" message - either the key is wrong/absent or their service is unreachable. Check that you've got a valid ZMongo API key; without one this node has nothing to fetch.
• No panel appears - the MOTD display lives in the pack's js/ frontend. If you installed the pack mid-session, a full ComfyUI restart (not just a workflow reload) is what registers the web assets.
• It's not doing anything visible - that's normal if their server has no MOTD set. This is a passive node; its absence of output is not a bug in your graph.
• Privacy consideration - this node (and the pack generally) phones home to businessprocessapplications.com with your key on every run. Custom nodes run arbitrary code with your permissions; only run this if you're comfortable with the hosted-service relationship. The Local File Store session is the way to use the pack without that.