Quickstart

Give n8n a spin

To spin up n8n, you can run:

npx n8n

It will download everything that is needed to start n8n.

You can then access n8n by opening: http://localhost:5678

Run with docker

To play around with n8n, you can also start it using docker:

docker run -it --rm \
  --name n8n \
  -p 5678:5678 \
  n8nio/n8n

Be aware that all the data will be lost once the docker container gets removed. To persist the data mount the ~/.n8n folder:

docker run -it --rm \
  --name n8n \
  -p 5678:5678 \
  -v ~/.n8n:/root/.n8n \
  n8nio/n8n

More information about the Docker setup can be found in the README file of the Docker Image.

In case you run into issues, check out the troubleshooting page or ask for help in the community forum.

Install with npm

To install n8n globally:

npm install n8n -g

Start

After the installation n8n can be started by simply typing in:

n8n
# or
n8n start

Start with tunnel

!> WARNING: This is only meant for local development and testing. It should not be used in production!

To be able to use webhooks for trigger nodes of external services like GitHub, 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 (uses this code: https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel).

To use it, simply start n8n with --tunnel

n8n start --tunnel