Starting with n8n: My Guide to setting up n8n
N8N has grown and proven to be a major go to automation tool both for Agentic workflows and other business automations.
For beginners, a main struggle can be on Hosting n8n.
I will try to explain my n8n starter pack that can get you started faster
Hosting
N8n offers two hosting methods, ie Cloud and self-hosting
1. Cloud Hosting
This is the easiest option to get started with n8n
They offer some generous packages that are billed by workflow execution, not node executions
2. Self-hosting
For the self-hosting options, I do recommend a 4 GB RAM minimum.
Run this on your PC via docker. Free to run
3. Server hosting
- Digital ocean
- Hetzner
领英推荐
- Heroku
- AWS
- Contabo ( Personally use this)
4. Database setup
5. Setup
Always have an env file with the basic/main environment variables, with the encryption key being the most important.These environment variables determine how your n8n runs and works. In a docker compose setup setup, these are the items to reference to get the actual values for our n8n
6. Data volumes
This is where most of us skip, and anytime we restart n8n, we loose all our data. The n8n_data volume is one compulsory aspect and a must have for any n8n setup. Its main role is persisting the n8n data such that you can restart/update n8n without losing any workflow, project or credential. (You can bypass this if you have a consistent encryption key, env and postgres database.)
The final step can be saving both the docker compose and env files, such that when doing a new setup, all you will need is copy and paste the data to your new setup
7. Webhooks and base url
These can be set in the Env file. They dictate where you can call your webhooks from or access n8n. If you want to use eg n8n.domain.com as the main n8n url and webhooks.domain.com for the webhooks, you can dictate that here
Happy Tasking!
PS: If you would like to get started with n8n and automations, Feel free to reach out to [email protected]