Node Red is an application built upon NodeJS which supports interfacing the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi via a webpage GUI.
It does not require that Apache or PHP be pre-installed, it can also run concurrently with Apache and PHP if they are.
Installing Node Red
Installing Node Red is a bit untraditional for a Raspberry Pi. This is because NodeJS has not been well maintained in the Raspibian Repositories.
As such, the developers of Node Red have made their own bash installer which installs version 14 of NodeJS along with NPM (Node Package Manager) and Node Red itself.
bash <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/node-red/linux-installers/master/deb/update-nodejs-and-nodered)The installer intentionally does not commit a Start At Boot parameter. As such, you must go to Start > Programming > Node Red to start the program.
However, it does have a daemon service which can be added to the Start At Boot parameters if so desired.
sudo systemctl enable nodered.serviceI have tested Node Red on my Pi 3B and it definitely is faster to access the editor and manager from another device on the network, rather than the Pi itself.
What can you do with Node Red?
You can control every GPIO output on the RasPi using this system. You can nest operators together, make logic circuits, among other things. This also allows that you can easily use various sensors or even UART/I2C/SPI data to influence GPIO pin states.
The only limitation I have found is that the x64 version of Raspibian does not allow any libraries or programs to pass the webcam image through to the Node Red GUI Dashboard. There are some examples out there on the web that were written in 2018-2022 using a couple different backend image processors with 32-bit Raspibian, but they seem to have been depreciated or otherwise not developed for the x64 version. This is unfortunate, as that functionality could lead to some great uses for this system.
Even without an ability for video passthrough, this system still lends its hand to simple GPIO automation or even making an IOT control board GUI.
References
https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/raspberrypi
https://www.instructables.com/Node-Red-Control-RaspberryPi/
https://www.influxdata.com/blog/node-red-dashboard-tutorial/