N8n with tunnel in production

[sujithpadar]

Hi, I’ve started using n8n recently and I am really impressed with the things that can be built with it.
I have built few workflows and I am in the process of deploying them locally.

In the Installation tutorial and in the forums I repeatedly see that:
“n8n with tunnel is only for local development and testing and not for prodution”

I wanted to know why it is the case?

Regards,
Sujith Padaru.

[MutedJam]

Hi @sujithpadar, welcome to the community!

One of the reasons would be that the tunnel sometimes can’t recover after a disconnect. An example would be the problem referenced in this post:

N8n.io Desktop Youtube API 504 Gateway timeout

Thank you for sharing the solution. This comes from standard n8n. On init, n8n looks for the tunnel subdomain in the env var TUNNEL_SUBDOMAIN_ENV, else in the tunnelSubdomain key in ~/.n8n/config, else it creates a random string and stores it in the tunnelSubdomain key, and uses this when creating the tunnel. The problem is that, when localtunnel is interrupted, it can fail to release the subdomain, so creating a tunnel with an existing subdomain results in a new subdomain in the format {adjec…

This can become especially painful when running n8n using a Wifi connection, but even with an ethernet network, network connections might get interrupted temporarily.

Also, keep in mind that this tunnel is a free service offered by n8n without any uptime guarantees. It might take a while to fix issues should they occur. Such problems would not typically occur when hosting n8n with a static IP with a public domain.

Hope this provides some clarification

[sujithpadar]

Thanks a lot for clarifieng!