N8N Custom Installation Video?

Questions
1

Hello,

I’m struggling with the setup of a custom installation of n8n, I’ve cloned the git repo to my computer and added my own custom nodes etc and running it locally with npm run dev, are there any videos going over how to put this onto a server? I’ve found that I’ve struggled with the textual guides unfortunately because I’m not sure if they support custom nodes (local directory of n8n) or not.

This is a brilliant piece of software though, it’s just trying to work out the easiest way to get it into a server such as Heroku or DigitalOcean.

I hope someone will be able to help me out :slight_smile:

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2

Hey @Joshua_Riley!

Thank you for opening this :slight_smile:

These are the steps that are on the top of my head (I’ve not tried them, hence I am not 100% certain)

  1. Push your repository with custom nodes on GitHub
  2. Clone the repository on your server
  3. Install the required packages
  4. Start n8n via PM2 (I would recommend going through the PM2 docs to learn more)

Alternatively, you do the following:

  1. Build a Docker image
  2. Pull the Docker image on your server
  3. Start the Docker container

I’ll try to come back to this topic with more detailed steps later.

3

Unfortunately PM2 doesn’t seem to work for me on Digital Ocean, here are the steps I took,

  1. Created a Ubuntu droplet.
  2. Installed node on droplet
  3. Installed git on droplet
  4. Installed NPM
  5. Installed PM2 via NPM globally
  6. Cloned my private repo to n8n subfolder on droplet using git clone,
  7. CD into that folder and ran pm2 start,
  8. It started ok (the ecoconfig script is set to “npm run n8n” as I couldn’t work out what else to put there) but when I go to my public IP address for the droplet it only shows the default ubuntu example page and I don’t know where the n8n editor is being hosted.

Any more info would be helpful, unfortunately I started with trying to use docker and had a lot of issues setting that up, I thought hosting my local version would be the easy part.

4

The public IP address would be pointing to the default port i.e 8080 (or 443). Since n8n uses port 5678, you will have to set up a reverse proxy, if you haven’t already. You can use Nginx, Traefik, or Caddy to configure your reverse proxy. Alternatively, you can run n8n on the default port by updating the env variable N8N_PORT. You can read more about it here: Configuration | Docs

I was also wondering if you tried this URL: YOUR_IP_ADDRESS:5678. If this works then for sure you have to route the incoming requests to that port.

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5

Hi Joshua,
I’ve done several deployments with docker on digital ocean in the last weeks. Just ping me and we can schedule a call to get you setup on your own instance (free of course).
I haven’t done it with own nodes yet, so I suppose we’d have to build our own docker image locally and then the process is the same.
PM2 works great on the Mac for me, but on digital ocean I’d go with traefik also for security reasons.

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