Installing nodes in comfy is just a gamble. Comfy does a great job of managing this stuff, though, and if you use good tools you will always have options. A backup is good to have, but if you use comfy manager it has a built-in snapshot system to allow you to revert to previous builds. My current "main" install of comfy has a ton of dependency conflicts, but as far as I know comfy does not uninstall dependencies and it does not downgrade packages for new node installs. If a package would break something, comfy won't install it. If conflicts occur, the broken nodes are not loaded instead of trying to install conflicting packages that might break functioning nodes.

If you have broken nodes you should be able to uninstall them and re-install them.

@Gongoloid is there a way to use the snapshot from commandline or something?, that would be nice. I cant even start that version comfyui anymore to get to the manager, it throws errors at startup now. Ussually when i break comfyui enough that it doesnt even start, i just start with a fresh one or a backup because it takes too much time to fix. If it only breaks a node you wanted then its a lot easier to fix as you said you can just reinstall the nodes.

By uninstall i meant that it uninstalls a certain version to install a specific or newer version, you can't have 4 different versions of numpy etc. as far as i know and sometimes a node requires a exact version number, and a different node will update that version to a current version and break the node that required the older version.

comfyui is also making a lot of changes to nodes in v3, so hopefully that will help for this type of thing in the future, here is the blog post about it if anyone hasn't seen from about a week ago, https://comfyui.org/en/comfyui-v3-dependency-resolution

didn't brick mine but I couldn't resolve an issue with missing "VocalAndSoundRemoverNode" from the deepextract custom node. Tried so many thing just wouldn't install with my comfy

@Nugus - I have to be completely honest with you here - I am new to comfy. I've used Auto/Forge and SwarmUI for almost everything I've ever generated. Comfy is just a necessity for some tasks. I have never used the snapshot function, and I don't know if it can run from the command line. I don't know if you can restore snapshots from a file or folder.

And yes I understood what you meant about dependencies. What I'm saying is that in my console outputs when installing nodes I see comfy explicitly state that uninstalling nodes is disallowed... I can't imagine how else you could manage dependencies for all the different nodes without laying down some rules. If comfy downgraded or uninstalled packages every time you installed a new node that claims to need a specific version of a package, comfy would never work.

I don't claim to know how it works to manage so many packages for so many different nodes. I have not used it extensively enough yet. But I do know that in my learning process I am downloading excessive amounts of nodes and packs, and so far nothing has refused to work. I take comfort in the fact that I am happily using the portable version with embedded python... until Windows refuses to let me use torch compile over write permissions...

@Gongoloid I've been using comfyui a while but I'm definitely not a expert, but i do watch the console when i install nodes and I saw it uninstalling dependencies, i opened up the log and copied some of them from this workflow install, but I havent looked into which exact node is the one that broke something, [2025-06-19 16:01:05.270] Installing collected packages: setuptools, kaldi_native_fbank, sensevoice-onnx

[2025-06-19 16:01:05.704] Attempting uninstall: setuptools

[2025-06-19 16:01:05.704] Found existing installation: setuptools 70.2.0

[2025-06-19 16:01:05.712] Uninstalling setuptools-70.2.0:

[2025-06-19 16:01:05.784] Successfully uninstalled setuptools-70.2.0

[2025-06-19 16:01:28.002] Installing collected packages: distlib, virtualenv, tenacity, nodeenv, jiter, identify, docstring-parser, cfgv, rich, pre-commit, instructor, swarm

[2025-06-19 16:01:28.443] Attempting uninstall: jiter

[2025-06-19 16:01:29.699] Found existing installation: jiter 0.9.0

[2025-06-19 16:01:29.707] Uninstalling jiter-0.9.0:

[2025-06-19 16:01:29.717] Successfully uninstalled jiter-0.9.0

[2025-06-19 16:01:29.719] Attempting uninstall: rich

[2025-06-19 16:01:30.080] Found existing installation: rich 13.0.1

[2025-06-19 16:01:30.093] Uninstalling rich-13.0.1:

[2025-06-19 16:01:30.117] Successfully uninstalled rich-13.0.1

[2025-06-19 16:01:52.663] Installing collected packages: onnxruntime-gpu

[2025-06-19 16:01:53.272] Attempting uninstall: onnxruntime-gpu

[2025-06-19 16:01:53.273] Found existing installation: onnxruntime-gpu 1.21.1

[2025-06-19 16:01:53.279] Uninstalling onnxruntime-gpu-1.21.1:

[2025-06-19 16:01:53.372] Successfully uninstalled onnxruntime-gpu-1.21.1

[2025-06-19 16:01:53.448] [!] Successfully installed onnxruntime-gpu-1.18.0

@Nugus - I think this may have something to do with comfy manager's security settings. Also, I found the documentation about using snapshots via CLI:

https://i.imgur.com/0NIvKeW.png

from here:

https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI-Manager/blob/main/docs/en/cm-cli.md