Empty ControlNet

Empty ControlNet is the pack's honest little no-op: zero inputs, one output, and the output is an empty list. Its description in the source is literally "ControlNet which does nothing." Which raises the obvious question - why does it exist?

Because EZ Generate takes an optional control_net input, and sometimes you need to fill that socket with "no, actually." A few concrete situations:

• A/B testing. Build two paths - a real EZ ControlNet and an Empty ControlNet - into a switch or a bypass group. Flip between "controlled" and "free" without rewiring or deleting nodes. Same seed, same prompt: the only difference is the control.
• Workflow templates. If you share workflows or keep a personal template, having a fixed "nothing here" node means the graph is complete and self-documenting. Someone loading your workflow sees the ControlNet slot is deliberately empty rather than accidentally dangling.
• Stacking logic. It emits the same EZ_CONTROL_NET type as everything else in the ControlNet family, so it drops into Concatenate ControlNet cleanly if you're building conditional stacks.

Mechanism, such as it is

execute() returns an empty list. That's the entire node. When EZ Generate later walks the ControlNet list applying each entry through ControlNetApplyAdvanced, an empty list means the loop never runs - the positive and negative conditioning pass through untouched. It's the difference between "this ControlNet has strength 0" and "there is no ControlNet," and for structure purposes the pack treats those the same way: nothing happens.

Inputs and outputs

• No inputs.
• CONTROL_NET (EZ_CONTROL_NET) - an empty ControlNet list, wired into EZ Generate's optional control_net input (or anywhere an EZ_CONTROL_NET is expected).

That's the whole surface area. There's genuinely nothing to configure.

Installing it

It ships with the Prompt Helpers pack - install once, get the whole family. In ComfyUI Manager search "Prompt Helpers" (Pauan/comfyui-prompt-helpers), install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Pauan/comfyui-prompt-helpers

Restart ComfyUI. No model downloads, no extra dependencies beyond the pack's own (PyYAML, desktop-notifier), and it needs ComfyUI 0.8.0+.

One clarification so you don't search for more than there is: this is not a bypass. If you want to mute a real ControlNet while keeping it in the graph, a bypass or strength-0 on the EZ ControlNet node is the more normal tool. Empty ControlNet is for when you want the socket filled with a deliberate nothing - and it does that job perfectly, because there's nothing else it could possibly do.