Tutorials

Tutorials are curated learning material from the Nodaro team — short videos and hands-on workflows organized by topic. Open the Explore tab on the home screen (/projects, or Tutorials in the sidebar): the Tutorials row under Level up shows them as cards, and All tutorials opens the full list, organized by category.

Two flavors per category

Each category mixes two kinds of tutorial. In the full list, categories with both flavors show two subsections; categories with only one drop the subheading.

📹 Watch & Learn — video tutorials

Walk through a feature in a few minutes. Click any card to open the video in a modal player. These are read-only — you watch, you learn, you go back to your work.

⚡ Try It Yourself — flow tutorials

Hands-on workflow templates you can run yourself. Each one is a complete, pre-wired Nodaro workflow with the right nodes, providers, and parameters already in place. The complexity badge tells you roughly how involved it is, and the credit estimate is what one run will cost.

Guided walkthroughs

Some flow tutorials open into a guided walkthrough instead of dropping you straight into the editor — a full-screen page that explains the workflow before you run anything. Cards that have one say so; the rest go to the usual template preview.

A walkthrough has two views, switched from the bar at the top:

Tutorial mode — the lesson. A numbered step rail on the left, and on the right the actual run this tutorial was built from: the real prompts, the images and videos it produced, the audio it generated. Hover a step to focus it. Every walkthrough is laid out a little differently, because each one teaches a different idea.
Canvas mode — the same workflow as a read-only canvas, every node and connection exactly as it sits in the editor. Nothing here is editable and nothing costs credits; it is there so you can see the machine behind the lesson. Sticky notes are hidden, since Tutorial mode already covers what they say — the node count at the bottom tells you how many.

Nothing on either view spends credits. Run tutorial in the top-right clones the workflow into one of your projects, exactly like Clone & Try below, and that copy is what you run.

Every walkthrough lives at a shareable /tutorials/<slug> URL. The page is viewable without signing in — sending someone a link just works; they are asked to log in only when they press Run tutorial.

Clone & Try

Hit Clone & Try on any flow tutorial card to copy the workflow into one of your projects:

Pick the target project from the dropdown
Click Clone & Open
You land in the editor with a fresh copy of the workflow

The original tutorial is untouched — you’re working on your own copy. Run it as-is, tweak the parameters, or pull the graph apart to see how each node connects. The clone is free; you only spend credits when you actually run the workflow.

If you don’t have any projects yet, create one from /projects first.

Self-hosted installs

A self-hosted Nodaro seeds a starter set of guided walkthroughs the first time it boots, so the Tutorials row has something in it on a fresh install. They are ordinary workflow templates owned by a built-in Nodaro account — clone them, run them, take them apart.

Seeding is idempotent: it runs on every boot, creates only what is missing, and updates a seeded tutorial only when the shipped version has actually changed. Editing your own clone never affects it.

The seeder is self-healing for anything missing: delete a seeded tutorial’s row (or its underlying workflow) and the next boot recreates it.

It does not, however, override a tutorial you deliberately turned off. Two things are treated as decisions about your install rather than as content, and a reseed leaves both alone:

whether the tutorial is active (is_active), and
whether it appears in the Tutorials list — the tutorial tag, which admins toggle from the Flow Tutorials screen.

The usual reason to turn one off is that the flow needs a provider this install has no key or balance for. Whichever way you switched it off, it stays off across content updates, and switching it back on is done the same way you switched it off. Any other tag on the template (for example a marketplace listing) is preserved too. Before this, every content release silently switched such a tutorial back on.

Everything else about a seeded tutorial is still content the release owns: its name, description, the workflow snapshot, and its tutorial category and ordering all update in place when the shipped version changes.

The workflows are seeded from the repo, but the images, videos, and audio they display are fetched from Nodaro’s CDN, so a walkthrough’s media needs an internet connection to render.

Operator tutorial packs (self-host)

Self-hosted business installs can add their own tutorials without rebuilding the image. Point NODARO_TUTORIAL_PACKS at one or more directories (comma-separated), each containing:

manifest.json — the pack’s name, the categories its tutorials use (slug + name, optional sortOrder and description), and optional locale, version, forbiddenPromptTerms, and creatorDisplayName (pack-wide author name shown on every tutorial card, e.g. your studio’s name — stamped onto each tutorial that does not set its own).
one *.json per tutorial — a workflow snapshot with its nodes, edges, and baked demo outputs (the real run the tutorial teaches). When a viewer clones the tutorial, those baked results come with it, so the copy opens showing the finished run rather than empty boxes. Optional card metadata the full tutorials list (Explore › Level up › All tutorials) surfaces: estimatedCredits (credits a run costs), nodeTypesUsed / providersUsed (the chips shown on the card), a per-tutorial creatorDisplayName (overrides the pack-wide author for this one tutorial), and listedIn (which channel the tutorial is first listed in — ["tutorial"] for the Tutorials tab, the default, or ["marketplace"] to surface it in the template marketplace browse instead). Omit any of them and the card falls back to 0 / no chips / the default author / the Tutorials tab. listedIn applies only on first seed; afterward the install owns the listing.

Packs are additive: they add tutorials to the built-in set and never change it. Each tutorial’s category must be declared in the pack’s manifest.json (the category is created automatically on first boot). Every referenced media asset must be a public https:// URL so the tutorial loads on any machine.

A pack that fails validation — invalid JSON, an undeclared category, a non-public asset URL, or a slug that collides with an existing tutorial — is skipped whole and logged; it can never corrupt the built-in tutorials. Restart the container to pick up pack changes. Cloud installs are seeded separately and ignore this variable.