I just set up a new N8N server on Ubuntu to run a few dozen existing workflows. One of the workflows uses the image manipulation module to add text to a PNG. It started throwing a “Stream Yields Empty Buffer” error.
At first I thought it was because I hadn’t installed the proper fonts. Eventually I fixed it by installing the imagemagick binaries.
Searching the forums for “Stream Yields Empty Buffer” -does- yield a few hits, so I wasted about an hour going down those rabbit holes only to discover that my problem was more fundamental.
I think it would be beneficial to add this because:
It would have taken 5 minutes to fix if I knew what the actual root problem was.
Any resources to support this?
Are you willing to work on this?
Nobody wants me working on code that others will use in production.
This is also one of the reasons we recommend using Docker over NPM as we don’t offically support NPM installs as things can sometimes get funky in local environements and using a container removes anything odd and also makes sure everything is where it should be.
Yeah, I went from running a container in Amazon ECS to running on an EC2 Ubuntu instance so I re-installed N8N. Lots of small little problems have come up. But this one really should be fixed in the module. It can’t be much code to check if the binaries are installed and throw a better worded error. EVEN BETTER would be a note in the editor, but that’s probably more work.
It is something we could probably look at doing as we do something similar for npm, We could also document that it needs to be installed as I don’t think we mention this in the documentation.
Personally I think we should stop publishing the npm package and only have the Docker image available which makes things a lot easier but I don’t think that is something we would do.
I would actually advise against going docker only and cutting out NPM. I think I’m pretty representative of the “hacker entrepreneur” category, and while I’m capable of spinning up a docker container I tend to look at it as a black box. It’s a small leap (in my mind) from container-only to executable-only, and that worries me.
I’m in the process of switching my ERP over to Odoo. Getting Odoo running on an Ubuntu instance is a mini nightmare - makes N8N look like a cakewalk. But I’m sticking with it because Odoo is also entirely source available and highly customizable, and I assume that a year from now when I’ve climbed a little ways up the learning curve it’ll be a much better platform because of that.
Lee
(There’s an image processing package called Thumbor that’s technically open source but is offered mainly as a container because there are lot of library dependencies and some binaries that need to be installed to take advantage of GPUs. From what I can tell in their forums, 90%+ of users just run the container, and that means there’s very little opportunity for an open source development / maintenance community to come up, which means it’ll probably disappear in a few years when the current maintainers get tired of it.)
