N8n Desktop as Service

Questions
1

Bonjour,
is it possible to make n8n desktop running in the background as a service ?
When I’m clicking on the cross, it’s closing the app.

Thanks

2

Hey @tiger360,

At the moment the Desktop app isn’t designed to work as a service but one day that may change, There are other options if you wanted the service approach like installing through Docker, using npm or using the cloud offering.

There are applications that can be used to run desktop applications like they are a service so it could be that one of those would work but I have not treid any with n8n.

I am not sure if it is on the internal roadmap for the future but one of the n8n may be able to answer that.

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3

Hi @Jon Is it ideal to have the n8n desktop app running for production? Will anything happen to the desktop app, like a sudden crash, if we leave it running for a long time/forever?

4

Hey @semighoti,

The desktop app is the same main code base so it would be ok for a production environment from that view but as you have to keep that window open it changes things and is really down to personal preference.

I wouldn’t run it as a production service as I would want a service I can manage and monitor for issues and it would be too easy for the window to be closed.

The desktop app also doesn’t currently get the same updates as the other install methods so you will be on that older version for a while.

The other install methods don’t take long to setup and you can get it up and running on a cheap VPS in about 10 minutes or even locally on a pi.

5

Thanks for the answer. I have been installing n8n onto a pi, but no success so far. I’ll give it a try tomorrow then. Thanks.

6

No problem, I use the docker approach on my Pi which I use as a test environment. I also have nginx in front of it as a reverse proxy to get outside world access but there are other ways to handle that as well.

1 Like
7

Hi,

We just write a quick doc about this here : https://miu-lab.notion.site/n8n-Desktop-as-a-Windows-Service-64d32afeeef9433082002ce55ddbaf00

Hope this help :slight_smile:
Cheers

4 Likes
8

Very nice, I spent a bit of time last year doing similar but used a different service wrapper and bundled it in an installer but never released it for anyone so this will be very useful for those after it.

Nice work :+1:

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