Ten n8n tips

n8n is a new-ish ETL tool I’ve been using for the better part of a year. It’s built with Typescript and Vue, and is Open Source, self hosted and free. Their cloud offering is a good price compared to the alternatives- with no api call limits, just workflow limits. Check them out at n8n.io

With n8n the modern web projects I work with are a breeze. I use it as an API micro-service communication layer between products for complex and simple opperations alike. Why build custom stuff burried in your code base when you could use existing APIs and a little typescript to get it done instead? No deployments, no downtime, no devop cycle (not really). It’s the definition of agile.

So for those that I know and work with, I’ve created some helpful docs and videos to get you going.

These are the first 10 things that come to mind when I think “N8N Tips”

1: Turn on save manual execution data while developing

Ref: n8n course one chapter five

In each workflow you can configure what data is saved - manual executions by default are NOT saved. Toggle this to ON for a better dev experience.

If something goes wrong in your manual execution, or the browser de-syncs, you can flip over to the execution tab and see everything that happened.

2: Pin or Mock Data while developing

These features do not work in production workflows- only while testing

By pinning and/or mocking data of previous nodes we can save a lot of time. This reduces api calls, and requirements/blockers to dev efforts.

3: Use expression fields to get node syntax

When working in a code node, the intellisense is nice- but doesn’t give a good UX for finding output or parameters of previous nodes.

With a partial execution, mocked data, or pinned data- use any node with an expression field (Like the Set node) at the end of the flow. With this you can use the standard expression click-adventure to quickly find the right syntax for specifics in the flow.

4: If a flow is out of sync

Switch to executions tab of the current flow and back, sometimes the UI just needs a bump.

and/or

Click stop - Most flows only take a matter of seconds- you can click stop on the running flow to many times force the UI to sync up

5: JmesPath and Luxon

First of all, Use them. While they are intimidating at first- they do save a lot of time and code effort. 90% of what you’ll use can be found on the two pages linked here for copy+paste

Also, go to their docs.

If you have a specific use case that’s not covered in the above, the docs for these libraries have more examples.

JmesPath examples

In n8n the Jmespath search syntax is reversed compared to the official docs

The examples in the JMESPath Specification follow the pattern search(searchString, object). The JMESPath JavaScript library, which n8n uses, supports search(object, searchString) instead.

The short version: in n8n you’ll do: $jmespath($input.all(), "[?json.whatever=='foo'].[field1, field2]")

### Luxon Formatting examples The short version: You’ll normally want $now or $today with .toLocaleString() including a format type found on the above link.

eg $now.toLocaleString(DateTime.DATETIME_FULL); //=> 'April 20, 2017 at 11:32 AM EDT'

6: Node settings

Use them!

Especially Always Output Data and Continue On Fail

7: Use the browser dev tools

console.log() can be used in any expression or code node, anywhere!

N8N frontend is built with Vue - if you are familiar with vue dev, you may be able to leverage vue dev tools in your browser.

Use the Network tab, especially with the HTTP Request node - when sending requests manually the payload will be logged in the network tab for review

8: Start at the docs - then community - then github/google

Trouble? Questions? Bugs? (Or so you think?)

First search the docs: https://docs.n8n.io/
If no luck, search the forum: https://community.n8n.io/
Still no luck? Quickly check their github issues page with no filters before turning to google.

9: Incoming data can be modified

While it may not be intuitive, the $input in each node is mutable (not read only).

This is demonstrated in the example code whenever you place a new code node, but that’s not where it stops. You can use the $input objects for storage of your transformed data, and then return $input.all() when you’re done, instead of trying to build your own object.

10: Use backticks and plain text

Another not-so-intuitive thing- you may get the impression from the docs that all expressions and code need to be wrapped in some special way.

  
{{ "I want " + "to concatenate this" }}

Not so- you CAN do

  
I want {{ "" }} to concatenate this

in an expression field.

You can also do this in code blocks to make life easier, and it’s perfectly valid:

  
let myBigString = `
<html>
    <div> All the things in the html</div>
    <p>Some ${$input.first().json.fieldName} dynamic stuff too.</p>
    <em>This also captures newlines!</em>
</html>
`

Ok, now go automate some stuff!