The recent change to the “save/publish” process seems problematic.
If I understand correctly, changing a workflow does not make the new workflow available to production execution via schedule/webhook/etc.
Instead you have to “Publish” the changes.
But there’s no indication on the “Workflows” view of workflows that have pending changes that are not published (an individual workflow shows a yellow dot and a “Publish” button).
You can tell if the workflow has not been published at all (no green dot), but there doesn’t seem to be an indication of “unpublished changes”.
Am I missing something?
It seems to me that the Workflow list should show a yellow dot for items that are published but which have pending changes.
I’ve been burned several times by having forgotten to publish all the changes for all the sub-workflows called by my main workflow.
Hi @tmalaher-telus
In n8n 2.x, saving only updatesa draft and production always run the last published version.
Given that limitation, the only documented ways to manage this today are:
Use the Publish button + status icon on each workflow’s canvas to confirm you’ve pushed the latest version live. [Saving & publish]
Use Version History to see which version is currently published and roll back or re‑publish as needed. [Autosave blog; History / published indicator]
feel free to reach out if you have any follow-up question.
I understand and I even agree with the new lifecycle.
I’m simply asking for a User Interface update to support managing workflows with the new lifecycle.
As I said, I’ve been burned multiple times by not realizing the latest version of a sub-workflow wasn’t published.
So we need a way to see which workflows have not had their latest changes published.
Adding the yellow dot to the Workflow list would help. It might even be worthwhile to add a Filter option. Currently you can list Published and Unpublished, how about adding “Pending Unpublished Changes” as a filter option?
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@tmalaher-telus
At the moment, the only way is to open each workflow and check the green or yellow indicator next to the Publish button; this status isn’t shown in the workflows list yet. I’m pretty sure this kind of indicator will be added to the list view in the future.
in short, until n8n adds a list-level flag or filter, the safest approach is to adopt a “publish sweep” routine (open → verify indicator → publish if yellow) for all dependent workflows whenever you make changes.
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And another feature suggestion:
IBM’s Rapid Infrastructure Automation tool (aka IBM Concert workflows), which has many similarities to N8N, puts a badge on each workflow indicating how it can be invoked (schedule, webhook, form).
I think something similar for N8N would be useful. Of course there would be a lot more badges since N8N has many more ways of being invoked. Maybe just “classes” of invocations (chat, web, schedule, …)
And again, the ability to filter on this would be useful (“Show me all my webhooks”)
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