N8n Data Migration from Dev to Prod Environment

Questions
1

Hello everyone, I need some guidance. I’m trying to migrate my workflows and credentials using n8n CLI in a shell script from my dev n8n to prod n8n , as both of my n8n are hosted in private VM instances. Both n8n are in separate projects and have identical versions and encryption keys. Exporting from dev to local repo was successful, but while performing import from local repo to prod n8n, I’m facing FK constraint errors. What can be done for this? Can someone help me on this?

  • n8n version: 1.122.4

  • Database : Postgres
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): Docker Private VM Instance
2

Hey @soraz049,

How are you trying to handle the migration at the moment? The quickest thing I can think of would be to use the CLI to export entities then copy them over and import them. Assuming you are using the same encryption key for both instances this should just work.

If you have different keys you can use the export:workflows command then export:credentials --decryptedto move them over and import.

I assume you have found them already but as a quick reference the docs are here: CLI commands | n8n Docs

Personally I have a workflow that saves my workflows to GitHub then I just copy them down and manually make the credentials again as typcally there won’t be a lot of credentials to add for each workflow so it is fairly painless.

3

Yeah, I am using the CLI for both import and export. Both have configuration of same encryption keys. We are trying to automate the whole flow, from CI/CD later once this shell script is ready. So, I am trying to avoid the manual process. Exporting from dev was not a problem. But, during the importing phase, it is raising an error for foreign key constraint in workflow_entity and workflow_history table. Later I found out they both depend on each other i.e. circular dependency.