n8n is a free node based "Open Source" (with Commons Clause) Workflow Automation Tool. It can be self-hosted, easily extended, and so also used with internal tools.
Is still in beta so can not guarantee that everything works perfectly. Also is there currently not much documentation. That will hopefully change soon.
A short demo (< 3 min) which shows how to create a simple workflow which automatically sends a new Slack notification every time a Github repository received or lost a star:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePdcf0yaz1c
To simply spin up n8n to have a look and give it spin you can simply run:
npx n8n
It will then download everything which is needed and start n8n.
You can then access n8n by opening: http://localhost:5678
To fully install n8n globally execute:
npm install n8n -g
After the installation n8n can be started by simply typing in:
n8n
# or
n8n start
To be able to use webhooks which all triggers of external services like Github rely on n8n has to be reachable from the web. To make that easy n8n has a special tunnel service which redirects requests from our servers to your local n8n instance.
To use it simply start n8n with --tunnel
n8n start --tunnel
By default n8n uses SQLite to save credentials, past executions and workflows. To use MongoDB instead you can either overwrite the default configuration on startup like this:
n8n start \
--NODE_CONFIG='{\"database\":{\"type\":\"mongodb\", \"mongodbConfig\":{\"url\":\"mongodb://MONGO_USER:MONGO_PASSWORD@MONGO_SERVER:MONGO_PORT/MONGO_DATABASE\"}}}'"
Or you can provide a custom configuration file by copying the default
configuration file (config/defaults.ts).
Make sure the file is also called default.ts and then set the path of the
parent directory as environment variable NODE_CONFIG_DIR.
For example like this:
export NODE_CONFIG_DIR=/directory-containing-config-file
Change in the config file the value under database.type from sqlite
to mongodb and adjust the Mongo connection URL
database.mongodbConfig accordingly.
n8n will then read your custom configuration and use MongoDB instead.
Workflows can not just be started by triggers, webhooks or manually via the Editor it is also possible to execute them directly via the CLI.
Execute a saved workflow by its ID:
n8n execute --id <ID>
Execute a workflow from a workflow file:
n8n execute --file <WORKFLOW_FILE>
It is very easy to create own nodes for n8n. More information about that can be found in the documentation of "n8n-node-dev" which is a small CLI which helps with n8n-node-development.
The following keyboard shortcuts can currently be used:
Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause
When developing n8n can be started with npm run start:dev.
It will then automatically restart n8n every time a file changes.
FAQs
n8n Workflow Automation Tool
The npm package n8n receives a total of 5,890 weekly downloads. As such, n8n popularity was classified as popular.
We found that n8n demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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