How to Install & Update n8n Locally

n8nAging📅 2024-09-03

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Tutorial Overview

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                         SETUP WORKFLOW                              │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                     │
│   1. Prerequisites                                                  │
│      │                                                              │
│      ├──► Install required software                                 │
│      │    • Node.js / Python / etc.                                 │
│      │    • Code editor (VS Code, Cursor)                           │
│      │                                                              │
│      ▼                                                              │
│   2. Configuration                                                  │
│      │                                                              │
│      ├──► Get API keys / credentials                                │
│      ├──► Set environment variables                                 │
│      │                                                              │
│      ▼                                                              │
│   3. Initialize N8N                                              │
│      │                                                              │
│      ├──► Run setup commands                                        │
│      ├──► Verify installation                                       │
│      │                                                              │
│      ▼                                                              │
│   4. Ready to Build!                                                │
│                                                                     │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What You'll Learn

• Core concepts explained
• Step-by-step implementation
• Practical examples

Transcript

[00:00] In this complete tutorial series, you will learn how to use N8n to automate everyday tasks and improve your productivity. N8n is an open source platform that lets you design powerful workflow automations with a sleek, intuitive interface. Unlike Zapier, Power Automate and make.com, N8n's open source nature gives you full control. You can self-host it and create unlimited automations without constraints. Or you can simply run N8n locally on your own machine absolutely free.

[00:32] Of course, you can also use their paid cloud service if you don't want to deal with installation and updates yourself. With its cutting edge AI features, N8n empowers you to build automations that are not just smart but game-changing. It's also worth mentioning that N8n offers integration with hundreds of service providers and external platforms. These range from integration with email providers, social media apps, databases and many, many more.

[01:02] And if you can't find an integration that works for your scenario, N8n allows you to effectively build your own integrations by using the HTTP request module. As an example, you could use the Gmail module to listen for new emails. We can then use any of the AI models to analyze the email to extract certain information like lead information. And we can then use Airtable or Google Sheets to store that data. The possibilities are endless. Throughout this series, I'll guide you through setting up N8n locally and in the

[01:34] cloud, and we'll also dive into the core fundamentals of using N8n. Together, we'll build automations from simple triggers to complex AI-driven workflows. Although N8n is generally seen as a developer-heavy workflow automation platform, I can reassure you that you do not need any deep coding knowledge to follow along. So, let's begin. As I've mentioned, you can access N8n in a few different ways. First, and probably the easiest, is to sign up for the cloud platform.

[02:06] This is a paid service offered by N8n, and if we look at the pricing, this could easily cost you about 20 euros per month. Now, we will have a look at self-hosting N8n and running N8n locally, which is free, but if you would like to use the cloud service, then you will find my affiliate link in the description of this video, and by signing up with that link, you will be supporting my channel. But in this video, I'll show you how to set up N8n on your own machine, so that you can create unlimited workflows for absolutely free.

[02:37] And in the next video, we will have a look at self-hosting N8n. Now, in order to set up N8n on our own machines, we need to install Node.js. So, go over to nodejs.org and click on "Download Node.js". Then, execute the file that you just downloaded, and then simply follow the installation instructions. Once installation is complete, we can go ahead and install N8n on our machines. The process is the same whether you're using Windows, Linux, or Mac. But on Windows, click on "Start", then

[03:09] open up the command prompt. On Linux or Mac, open up the terminal. Now, let's go ahead and install N8n. Let's enter "npm install n8n g", and let's press "Enter". This will take a few minutes to complete. Now that the installation is complete, I'm just going to clear the screen to make this a bit more readable. Now, the next time you access N8n, you don't have to execute the installation process again. To access N8n, you can simply enter "n8n" or "n8n start".

[03:43] Either of these should work. So, let's enter "n8n", press "Enter", and this will do a little bit of setup for us. And afterwards, you should see this URL, which you can copy and paste into your browser. Right, so we can now setup an admin account within our local N8n instance. So, enter your email address, first name, last name, and a password. And lastly, click on "Next". Then, on the next screen, simply fill out this form as well. And once you're done,

[04:14] click on "Get Started". You will now see the N8n dashboard, which should look something like this. Now, before we move on with building Workflows in N8n, I also want to show you how you can update your instance of N8n as well. And I'm going to clear the screen just to make this a bit more readable. And in order to update N8n, simply enter "npm update gn8n". The N8n community is constantly adding new features and improvements to the platform.

[04:44] So, I personally like to keep my instance of N8n up to date. So, I'll simply run N8n again, and let's open it in the browser. So, let's have a quick look at the N8n dashboard. Once we start creating our Workflows, we will be able to see all of them under this Workflow tab over here. We can also switch to the Credentials tab to start adding credentials to third-party systems. And we will use this during the course of this tutorial series. On the left-hand side, we can click on

[05:15] templates, which will take us to a marketplace with pre-created Workflows, which we can simply copy into our N8n instance. For instance, let's go to the AI category, and here we can see a whole bunch of Workflows that use AI in some way or another. For instance, creating an AI Slackbot with Google Gemini. If we click on any of these templates, we can see the details of the workflow in this view over here. And on the left, we can see these icons,

[05:46] which represent the nodes that are being used within this project. And we can click on Import Template to Local Host, which will then create a copy of that template in our local instance of N8n. I'm simply going to cancel this, as we will be creating these projects from scratch. Under templates, we can also access variables. Now, variables are only available in the Enterprise plan, which you can access from the N8n Cloud Service. And this will simply allow you to create

[06:16] certain variables which you can share globally between your different Workflows. We will not need this during this tutorial series. We can also access all executions, which will show the execution history of our Workflows. Then the Help section can also be extremely useful for finding videos and documentation related to N8n. I highly recommend having a look at their course documentation. Then below that, we can see the name of the logged in user. And if we click on this menu, we can sign

[06:47] out or we can go to Settings. First, let's switch over to Dark Mode. So under Theme, I'm going to switch to Dark Mode and save my changes. That's much better. If we were on one of the paid plans, we can click on Usage and Plan to see the remaining Workflows that we are able to create. But since we're self-hosting N8n, we can create unlimited Workflows. Then under Users, we can add additional users to our instance by clicking on Invite.

[07:17] But of course, this feature is only available if we upgrade our N8n package. Many of these other menu items are specific to the Enterprise plan, so we will not be looking at those in this video. But one menu that is important is this N8n API menu where we can create API keys. So if you ever wanted to call N8n from outside of the N8n platform, you can generate an API key and then make use of the many services exposed by N8n to

[07:48] interact with the platform. But that is an advanced topic that we might cover later on in the series. Now let's go back to our dashboard. If you found this video useful in any way, then please consider hitting the like button on this video and subscribe to my channel to stay up to date with more N8n content and other no-code automation platforms and AI builders. So now that we have N8n running locally on our own machine, we can move on to creating our first workflow. But first, in the next video, I will show

[08:19] you how to deploy N8n to the cloud so that you can access N8n from anywhere.