How configure tô N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE

[Presley_Nunes_de_Men]

hello, how do I configure my n8n to “N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE to filesystem”?

to not use the computer’s RAM memory

I’m using node.js 18.17.0 on my pc, I don’t use pm2, just pure npm. n8n 1.1.1

[Jon]

Hey @Presley_Nunes_de_Men,

You would need to set the environment option using whatever your OS of choice suggests so for me on my Mac it would be…

export N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE=filesystem
n8n start

[Presley_Nunes_de_Men]

sorry for the delay in answering but this command didn’t work for me, my n8n only accepts exporting credentials and workflow. is there any other way to solve it?

[MutedJam]

Hi @Presley_Nunes_de_Men, looks like you’re using Windows in which case export would fail (as this is *nix specific and wouldn’t let you set environment variables on Windows).

Instead you could do this through the Windows UI, check out Create and Modify Environment Variables on Windows for an example of how this could work on Windows 10. The variable would be N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE and the value filesystem.

Make sure to restart n8n after changing your environment variables.

[Presley_Nunes_de_Men]

sorry for the delay in responding

I managed to solve it on my Windows 10.

In Windows Power Shell (admin), I typed the following command line:

wsl --install

installed Ubuntu on windows

Windows installed dependencies necessary to run Linux Ubuntu directly on Windows itself, a command commonly used to install docker dekstop on Windows. But I didn’t install docker, instead I installed nodejs npm for linux via the terminal.

sudo apt install nodejs -y

sudo apt install -y build-essential

sudo npm install -g node-gyp

sudo npm install sqlite3 --save

sudo npm install -g n8n

export N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE=filesystem

n8n start

and it worked perfectly.