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Don’t have a local GPU — or want a bigger one on demand? Deploy ComfyUI to a cloud GPU pod and drive it in natural language from the agent running on your machine, on your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription.
The pod only serves ComfyUI + Manager + the Agent Panel UI. The agent’s brain (the panel orchestrator) runs locally on your machine on your own subscription — so a cloud pod never burns GPU-hours on the LLM, and no API key or agent login ever touches the box. See Topology.

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One-click template (fastest path)

The prebuilt image boots ready to be driven by the Agent Panel — ComfyUI + Agent Panel + ComfyUI-Manager v2 are baked in, no setup: Deploy on RunPod
  1. Click Deploy on RunPod and pick a GPU (an RTX 5090 / any Blackwell or Ada card works — the image ships cu128 torch).
  2. Keep the template defaults: HTTP port 3000 exposed and a network volume mounted at /workspace.
  3. Wait for the pod to come up. An auto-refreshing “ComfyUI is starting…” page serves until it’s ready (~30–60s ComfyUI init).
Then jump to Connect from your machine.

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Deploy & control it from the Agent Panel (v0.44+)

Since comfyui-mcp 0.44, you don’t have to touch the RunPod console or run a CLI command at all — the Agent Panel has a RunPod control panel that deploys, connects, monitors, and stops a pod for you, and the same control sheet ships in the mobile app.
  1. Set your key once. In the panel’s API-Keys card, paste your RUNPOD_API_KEY. It’s stored server-side in ~/.comfyui-mcp/.env — never in the browser.
  2. Open the RunPod control panel from the host pill in the panel toolbar (it reads 🟢 Local · your rig to start).
  3. Deploy or connect. Hit Deploy for a one-tap pod (it routes through the template’s deploy link and falls back across GPU types / COMMUNITY→SECURE when capacity is tight), or pick an existing pod by name from the dropdown and Connect.
  4. Watch it live. The status card shows GPU / VRAM / uptime / ⋅hr∗∗andan∗∗idleauto−stop∗∗countdown,andthehostpillflipsto∗∗🔵RunPod⋅<pod>⋅GPU⋅·hr** and an **idle auto-stop** countdown, and the host pill flips to **🔵 RunPod · <pod> · GPU · /hr — so where a render runs is never ambiguous. The agent installs your custom nodes + LoRAs and downloads your models onto the pod, so you get exact canvas parity with your local rig.
  5. Switch back and stop. Use Local retargets rendering to your own rig instantly; Stop shuts the pod down. Idle auto-stop (RUNPOD_IDLE_STOP_MINUTES, default 15; only counts while you’re actually rendering on the pod) is the cost backstop if you forget.
Dead-man switch (v0.46+). Idle auto-stop lives in the comfyui-mcp process — if that process dies (crash, closed laptop), the backstop used to die with it and the pod billed forever. Pods created through the connector now carry a pod-side watchdog: while comfyui-mcp minds the pod it heartbeats every few seconds; if the beats stop, the pod stops itself (never terminates — your /workspace survives) after a grace period (45 min after boot with no heartbeat, then 20 min between beats; RUNPOD_DEADMAN_BOOT_GRACE_S / RUNPOD_DEADMAN_BEAT_GRACE_S). “Minding” survives Use Local and Unwatch — those only change what the UI shows; the watchdog fires only when comfyui-mcp itself is gone (or the pod exits). The watchdog stops the pod with the pod-scoped API key RunPod auto-injects into every pod — your account-wide key never leaves your machine, and there is nothing credential- wise to opt out of. Leave it unarmed with deadman:false on runpod / action: "create" (or RUNPOD_DEADMAN=0), or DEADMAN_DISABLE=1 as a pod env. Console-deployed pods never carry the heartbeat token, and custom- template deploys (RUNPOD_TEMPLATE_ID) default it off — pass deadman:true only if that image ships our watchdog.
New to renting GPUs for ComfyUI? The blog walks the whole flow end to end: Run ComfyUI on a rented cloud GPU.
The rest of this page is the manual / CLI path — still fully supported, and what the control panel drives under the hood.

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Connect from your machine

Once the pod is up, grab its public proxy URL (RunPod → your pod → the :3000 HTTP endpoint, e.g. https://<pod-id>-3000.proxy.runpod.net) and run one command on your laptop:
For a remote HTTPS pod, connect automatically opens a secure encrypted wss:// tunnel (via Cloudflare) to the agent bridge on your machine and hands the pod’s panel that URL for you — so the pod’s HTTPS page reaches the agent with no browser prompt, nothing to copy, in any browser. For a local ComfyUI it uses the plain ws://127.0.0.1:9180 loopback bridge. Either way the agent — and your Claude/ChatGPT login — runs only on your machine; nothing is installed on the pod. To finish, in the pod’s ComfyUI open the Agent Panel sidebar and:
  1. Turn on Settings → General → “Use external/local orchestrator (advanced)”.
  2. Click Connect.
Now drive the graph in natural language.
Why a tunnel? A pod page is served over https://, and browsers block a secure page from opening an insecure ws:// socket to your machine (mixed content / Private Network Access). The tunnel gives the bridge a valid-TLS wss:// URL — gated by a per-session random token — so it just works everywhere with no prompt.
If the pod sits behind auth, set COMFYUI_AUTH_TOKEN (plus optional COMFYUI_AUTH_HEADER / COMFYUI_AUTH_SCHEME) on the local connect command. For a pod fronted by Cloudflare Access, create an Access service token and set CF_ACCESS_CLIENT_ID + CF_ACCESS_CLIENT_SECRET — both ride every ComfyUI request (HTTP + the queue-watcher WebSocket), so the connector passes the gate while the human sign-in page stays up for browsers.

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Keep everything on your machine (no Cloudflare)

Prefer not to route the bridge through Cloudflare? Reach the pod through your own SSH port-forward so the page is a loopback origin (plain ws:// works, no tunnel):
Then open http://localhost:3000. Or connect at the pod’s direct https URL but force the plain loopback bridge with --insecure-bridge (you then arrange your own path for the pod page to reach ws://127.0.0.1:9180). Want a stable, self-hosted alternative to the default Cloudflare quick tunnel — your own domain, no ephemeral hostname, full ownership of that hop — instead of either of the above? See Self-hosted relay.

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Topology: where the agent runs

The pod deliberately ships no Node.js agent, no Agent SDK, and no LLM client — they’d burn GPU-hours for nothing. The reasoning loop lives on your machine; the pod is a pure ComfyUI backend. This is the same remote-driving model the local Agent Panel uses, just with ComfyUI on a cloud GPU instead of localhost.

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What persists (and what doesn’t)

The image is optimized for fast stop/start. The heavy software — ComfyUI, its venv, Manager v2 — is baked into the immutable image and run from /opt/ComfyUI, while custom_nodes lives on the /workspace volume (symlinked) so your installs persist. A warm restart does no full install/sync/seed and just relaunches ComfyUI.
Custom nodes installed at runtime survive a restart. custom_nodes is symlinked to /workspace/custom_nodes; on each boot the image’s baked nodes (Agent Panel + builtins) are seeded/refreshed into it (so an image upgrade ships a current panel while your own nodes are kept), and each node’s Python deps are reinstalled into the venv from a persistent pip cache on the volume — fast after the first time. Models persist too. To bake a node so it needs zero boot-time work, add it to the Dockerfile and rebuild the image (below).

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Build & deploy your own image

The one-click template is the prebuilt image. A lean, prebuilt image — same ComfyUI + Agent Panel + Manager, but without the optional donor extras (runpod-uploader/croc/app-manager) or the baked SDXL spotcheck checkpoint, built continuously in CI — is also public at ghcr.io/artokun/comfyui-mcp-runpod:cu128-lean if you just want to point a RunPod template at something without building anything yourself. To customize it — pin versions, bake in extra custom nodes, change the model layout — build and push your own from docker/runpod/:
No GPU is needed at build time. Then create a RunPod Pod template pointed at your image with HTTP port 3000 exposed and a network volume at /workspace. The docker/runpod/README.md is the full build reference — the multi-stage Dockerfile, the exact ComfyUI launch flags, the extra_model_paths.yaml volume mapping, the Manager remote-install gate, environment variables, and the size/pin tradeoffs.

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Other cloud targets

The connect flow is not RunPod-specific — it works against any reachable ComfyUI that serves the Agent Panel (another cloud host, a VPS, a box on your LAN). Point connect at its URL and flip the external-orchestrator toggle:
For exposing comfyui-mcp itself as a hosted, authenticated MCP server (rather than deploying ComfyUI), see Remote / hosted connector.