N8n Local Agent for Infrastructure Automation

Questions
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Hey everyone,

Just to clarify up front: I’m not talking about AI agents in this post. I know n8n is heavily used alongside AI tools, and the word “agent” might immediately bring AI to mind — but that’s not what I mean here.

What I’m referring to is a local agent: something lightweight that runs on a local machine or server, which can execute scripts, automations, or commands locally, while the main n8n instance (cloud or self-hosted) triggers and communicates with it remotely in a secure way.

Has anyone figured out a solid and secure way to set this up with n8n? Or heard if there are any plans for n8n to officially have its own agent?

Other platforms already offer something similar:

  • PagerDuty Runbook Automation has their Runner agent
  • Rewst.io uses their open source Agent Smith
  • I believe Make.com might offer something like this under enterprise (not 100% sure)

This setup seems especially useful for MSPs or teams managing hybrid/on-prem infrastructure (which is my use case).

I would love to hear if anyone has built something like this with n8n, found a workaround, or has any recommendations.

Thanks!

1 Like
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Hi @Guilherme_Couto
We understand that n8n doesn’t currently offer a built-in “local agent” for secure remote execution of workflows on a local machine.
Let’s hope that you get a reply from any users who successfully set up a workaround that mimics a local agent using n8n’s existing features.

We had a look and could not find any public announcements or official documentation from n8n that explicitly state plans for a first-party “local agent” feature similar to what you described.

Since this isn’t a feature n8n currently offers, the best way to get this on their roadmap is to create a Feature Requests. We highly recommend you post this idea on the official n8n community forum. Your detailed explanation of the use case, mentioning similar solutions from PagerDuty and Rewst, would be a very compelling argument. The n8n team actively monitors the forum for user feedback and feature suggestions, and a well-articulated request has a good chance of being noticed and considered for future development.

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Thanks for your reply. I would love to find someone that found a workaround to achieve this withou too much trouble. But following your advice, I have added it to the feature requests’ list. I would appreciate it if you could vote and share it. Cheers.

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