I am sorry if this is a rooky question.
I have followed the NPM installation instructions (which are minimalists)
I get the prompt saying that it installed successfully, but I am not able to access the site.
I have an IP address and its a straight VPS, no kubernetiks or Docker involved.
I am guessing that I need to update some files and maybe the firewall but there are no instructions.
I was not able to find the .env file
Is there any document that shows what needs to be done, other than
“npm install n8n -g”
I would recommend following the Docker guides, npm is good for testing but there is a chance we will be removing that option in the future.
It sounds like the issue could be with the firewall have you opened port 5678? Did you also run n8n start after installing it? You will likely need to set some environment variables as well depending on what settings you need, You would do this the normal way for your OS of choice.
I realized that Docker is actually the only way to be able to install.
I did open the firewall port 5678 and ran n8n start but it did not work.
I am sure I need to set the host name but I do not know how to do this.
If you are not supporting this platform, I suggest removing it as an option. The documentation is not full and its a shame.
Thank you again.
The documentation will likely be removed if we do decide to drop it, Also note that while the documentation is not full or complete for npm we do recommend that users have knowledge of managing the environment they plan to use.
It can work using npm and we do have users currently running it that way but the number of users is minimal and it often causes confusion as not everyone knows how to run an npm package as a background service and there are a bunch of ways it could be done.
If n8n is started and the port is open it should just work you would only need to set a host name if you were using a reverse proxy or a domain to access it, This would be done with the WEBHOOK_URL env option.
Jon thanks again. yes, I understand the complexity of NPM.
I selected that because I thought that using Docker creates an overhead that is not needed for a single-purpose machine.
I tried a different env option but did not realize it is the WEBHOOK_URL.
Do I need to set it up even when using only the IP address, and not a host name?
You would only need to set the webhook url if you are using the webhook node or similar so that we can tell which services to connect to. If you are using an IP you can set it to the IP.
