I’m new to n8n and absolutely loving it! I’m currently self-hosting and have been watching a lot of tutorials.
Now, I’m eager to start building my own workflows. However, I don’t have any coding experience, and I’m finding it challenging to know which nodes to use for specific tasks. For example:
How do you determine which node to pick next?
When should you use HTTP requests, custom code, triggers, or actions?
Are there tools or resources that help suggest which nodes you need based on your workflow goals?
I’ve noticed in tutorials that creators often intuitively pick nodes or write custom functions. I’m curious—how do you develop that intuition?
Any practical advice or resources you can recommend would be greatly appreciated!
Based on this info you could build your workflow step by step.
Example: you want to upload some regular pdf bills which you are receiving to the email to your google sheet
you have a clear goal
how you can achieve it?
Let’s divide the task to smaller ones:
you need to get pdf bills. What do you need for that?
Acess to your mailbox
Fetch emails from it
Download pdf files from the emails which contain any one.
So you will need a trigger node to receive new emails and some usual node to fetch emails you already have in the mailbox which also supports to download attachments. Which nodes you can use? Maybe, Gmail trigger node (if the mailbox located there), or IMAP trigger (if there is no specific node for the mail provider).
Next, you need to upload pdf files to the google sheet. How? Is there any node related to the gSheet? If yes, ok, lets do it. If not, then what other options do you have? maybe the service has an API which you can use?
You then figure out that there is a gSheet node in n8n, so the goal seems achievable.
Then you are trying to build the workflow step by step, adding new nodes during the developing. The process looks quite similar as puzzle solving. You have to add new nodes which will get you closer to the goal.