Encryption key

Questions
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4

Hi! I’ve also just encountered the same issue while upgrading from 0.xx to 1.9. Investigating now, will post back what I found but the story so far is:

  • Postgres
  • Running on a docker compose network
  • Removed N8N_BASIC_AUTH_ACTIVE=true, N8N_BASIC_AUTH_USER, N8N_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD from the docker compose service environment variables
  • Never set N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY
  • Directory where n8n is stored is subject to git branches and we switched between branches a few times

My hypothesis is that since we switched git branches, we may have inadvertently wiped some untracked temp directories which contained a generated encryption key? Riffing off Credentials could not be decrypted "EncryptionKey" - #5 by MutedJam

Update!

OK, some more sleuthing led me to remember that we configured n8n to save the autogenerated encryption key (and other stuff) elsewhere. I retrieved it the key from elsewhere in the filesystem and plugged it into N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY and it worked.

But that begged the question: why isn’t n8n able to retrieve that file anymore? Then I remembered that part of the 1.0 version bump involved changing the docker user from root to node, so I had to make the following tweak to my docker compose n8n service environment:

-     - ${DATA_FOLDER}/.n8n:/root/.n8n
+     - ${DATA_FOLDER}/.n8n:/node/.n8n