I’m curious about the best way to handle credentials like OAuth tokens for Google Apps when working with clients. Since credentials need to be configured for every node, the first time I did it, it felt quite tedious and time-consuming. Should we walk clients through this process over a call? What’s…

@Maxwell45 never handle raw client credentials yourself. For OAuth (Google, etc.): have the client click through “Sign in with Google” themselves using their own account, even if you’re screen-sharing and guiding them. Never authorize with your own account “temporarily” you’ll just have to redo it …

Hey @Maxwell45 , while you wait for a response, here are some things that might help: ▶ Suggested resources PurveshGandhi, mje, Quantum_Jake - you’ve helped with similar issues before, can you take a look? Automatically suggested by n8n’s community bot. It’s a pilot - please share feedback here .

I’ve been thinking about this same question. My instinct is that for technical users you could probably walk them through generating and entering their own credentials directly, but for non-technical clients that doesn’t seem realistic, you’d likely end up handling it yourself. That raises somethi…

[image] Maxwell45: What’s the recommended best practice for this?" These threads might help [image] Delivering a workflow to clients General Hey Andrej, Welcome to the community! First off, your instinct is 100% correct—never ask a client for their raw…

One thing worth adding on top of what’s already here: n8n’s Sharing tab and Projects handle who can use a credential, but they’re not a tenant-isolation boundary. Users added to a project can execute workflows using credentials created in that project even if you never explicitly shared them 1:1 - i…

Hi @Maxwell45 Welcome! Credentials are per service, not per node. You create one Google credential and every node of that type picks it from the credential dropdown, so a workflow with ten Gmail nodes still needs one authorisation, not ten. On Cloud, Managed OAuth2 covers Gmail, Google Sheets, Dri…

This is the exact question that pushed me down a rabbit hole, so a few things I’ve landed on from doing it for real: For technical clients, walking them through entering their own credentials works. For non-technical ones it’s not realistic — but “handling it yourself” doesn’t have to mean you hold…

@ASHIM_DOLEY s point about tokens expiring silently while n8n still reports success is the same root problem showing up somewhere else — a run finishing without an error only proves the call didn’t error, not that the intended outcome actually happened. Same pattern with wrong-record writes, wrong-a…

Agreed on all of it — “the call didn’t error” and “the thing you wanted actually happened” being different claims is the cleanest way I’ve seen it put. One place I’d split from “the fix is the same regardless”: outcome verification tells you it broke, but not who broke it, and those need different …

Fair split — I’ll take the correction. Verification catches all three cases equally, but it only tells you that the run lied, not whose lie it was. Different problems. On your question: the second one, and it’s not close. Lost time is a cost — you eat it and move on. Not being able to say whose sid…

How should client credentials be set up?

Questions

kjooleng July 25, 2026, 2:36am 4

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How should client credentials be set up?

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