A non-destructive overlay that lights up every node by graph distance from the one you click.
Diagnostic for big real workflows · Educational for understanding workflows other people built · Surgical when you need to focus on one neighbourhood at a time.
Direct neighbours glow red, then orange, yellow, green, blue, violet (6+ hops or unconnected).
1. Diagnostic — for big, real workflows. When a graph grows past ~20 nodes you spend a lot of time mentally tracing wires. "If I tweak this CLIP encode, what does it ripple into? Which sampler is on the other end of this controlnet apply? Why is that model loader still wired in — does anything still consume it?" Lighthouse answers all three at a glance. Right-click the node you're curious about, pick Anchor from this node, and the whole canvas tells you how the graph relates to it: direct dependencies and consumers in red, two-hops in orange, all the way down. Pull the Focus slider up and only the immediate neighbours stay lit while everything further away fades to black — useful for surgically zooming in when a workflow is dense.
2. Educational — for learning a workflow you didn't build. Workflows downloaded from civitai / GitHub / a friend can be intimidating walls of nodes. Lighthouse turns them into a guided tour. Anchor on the CheckpointLoader to see the model's full influence radius (everything red is patching the model directly, orange is one step removed, etc.). Anchor on the KSampler to see what's feeding the sample. Anchor on a SaveImage to walk the chain backward all the way to the inputs. Each anchor point teaches you a different slice of the workflow's structure without having to manually follow every wire.
The slider also makes a great quiz tool: dial Focus to max, anchor on a node, and you can only see its 1-hop neighbours — try to predict what's beyond before you slide back down.
Same workflow, Focus slider pulled up — only the 1-hop neighbours of the anchor stay lit.
Right-click any node and pick 🔦 Lighthouse: Anchor from this node. The rest of the workflow lights up by graph distance from that node:
| Distance | Halo |
|---|---|
| 0 (the clicked node) | bright white double-ring |
| 1 hop (direct neighbours) | red |
| 2 hops | orange |
| 3 hops | yellow |
| 4 hops | green |
| 5 hops | blue |
| 6+ hops or unconnected to anchor | violet |
A floating legend panel appears in the bottom-left of the viewport while the mode is active, with a colourbar and a header that reads "anchored on <node title>". Click the × in its corner (or the right-click menu's Off item) to dismiss — the workflow returns to its normal appearance.
Works in both directions — Lighthouse walks both upstream (input links, what feeds this node) and downstream (output links, what consumes it).
Two menu items, both on the node right-click menu (not the canvas menu):
- 🔦 Lighthouse: Anchor from this node — runs the BFS straight away from the right-clicked node. Turns Lighthouse on if it was off.
- 🔦 Lighthouse: Off — turns the mode off and hides the legend panel.
Pure JS extension. When you pick Anchor from this node, Lighthouse runs a breadth-first search across node.inputs[i].link and node.outputs[i].links[] to build a nodeId → distance map. The overlay is then drawn by extending LGraphCanvas.prototype.drawNode to stroke a coloured ring around each node based on its distance, and to wash a black overlay over its body proportional to the Focus slider position.
Nothing in the workflow is modified. No bgcolor, no color, no link state, no node properties. The overlay is purely visual; turn the mode off and the canvas is identical to before.
- Drop the
comfyui-lighthousefolder intoComfyUI/custom_nodes/. - Restart ComfyUI (or reload the browser tab if hot-reloading is on).
- Right-click any node → 🔦 Lighthouse: Anchor from this node.
- The workflow lights up. Drag the Focus slider in the legend panel to dial in. Right-click any node → 🔦 Lighthouse: Off when done.
- Nodes not connected to the anchor are treated as the last band (violet, "6+ hops / unconnected"). They get a violet outline and respond to the Focus slider the same way the actual 6+ hop nodes do, so unconnected nodes are visually distinct from "definitely related but far away".
- Bidirectional, not directional. Distance counts hops in either direction. If you only want "downstream from here", that's a future toggle — open an issue if you want it.
- Multi-select picks the first. If you have several nodes selected, Lighthouse anchors on the first one. Click a single node to be unambiguous.
If this saves you wire-tracing time: