How to enable community nodes as tools

Questions
1

Hey everyone, so I am making mcp agents which makes agent even more smarter and I have installed a community nodes that was made by nerd.io shoutout to that guy
and I went to github documentation of nerd.io he mentioned about setting an enviornment variable the code is this ```
N8N_COMMUNITY_PACKAGES_ALLOW_TOOL_USAGE=true

he also sent various type of codes depending on which hosting platform you are using. actually I am using local hosting platform on command prompt in windows 11
which is free.
but the problem is how can I set up an enviornment variable on windows 11 like I tried on command prompt but its not working

can someone help me please!

2

Hi, are you using docker or node/npm?

3

I am using npm

4

Hi, your issue might be similar to this one, since you are specifically talking about MCP / win11 / nerdio
Getting Failed to execute operation: The file or directory does not exist for n8n-nodes-mcp - Questions - n8n Community

5

Yo I figured it out use wsl to install n8n it’s free and it execute the command that I mentioned in the post

1 Like
6

Hi so why not use docker? It will be easier to deploy elsewhere

7

If you’re starting n8n with the command line npx n8n start you can just do export N8N_COMMUNITY_PACKAGES_ALLOW_TOOL_USAGE=true npx n8n start

8

Hey there, try and update to the latest n8n version first. I had a lot of setup issues before with the Docker edition not seeing the variable correctly via DigitalOcean.

I made a video on MCP as well as the issues and how I fixed them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqCIB1fBSn8 (Fast forward to around the 12 min mark to see how I got it working via a Docker update for n8n)

Here are my steps:

  1. Find where your docker image is (On my end it was located in opt/n8n-docker-caddy

  2. Once you navigate there write the following command:
    sudo docker compose pull

  3. Once done, then simply run:
    sudo docker compose up -d

Hope that helps!

9

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