Private node npm publish workflow. T

Questions
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1

Excuse my ignorace but I’ve never built anything with node and docs seems to be contradictory.

I am trying do develop and test a node. At present stage I want to upload it to n8n instance and test in prod.
But n8n docs offer two options -

  • Submit a community node (definitely not ready yet)
  • Create a Docker image with the node installed in n8n (definitely an overkill since I am updating it heavily)

What is the proper workflow to test my node in prod before publishing it to community?

2

Hey @io_io,

Both of those options look ok to me once you have finished working on your node but during development a common approach would be to use npm link which I think is the approach we document.

There are other things you can try depending on how your current production environment is configured.

3

Thanks Jon.

I want to test the very part where I publish a node to npm and find it available and working in a prod server.

Would it work if i publish it to npm as any other node and then install it with npm Package name?
I am trying to save hours of tinkering here tbh.

4

Hey @io_io,

If it is testing the publish and install I would just publish it to npm then in n8n under the settings you can use the community nodes feature to install it.

5

thanks. that worked for me.

now i am trying to understand how come the same npm package works at local machine and does not work at remote.

6

Do you get an error when trying to install?

7

nope.

It installs just fine on both instances.

My node has a few resourceLocator fields that fill well on local but fail on remote.

I am sure that credentials at remote are fine because rest api returns a necessary list via http node with the same creds and I can not figure out a way to troubleshoot what is going wrong on remote.

update -
it throws an error
message “fetch is not defined”

It looks like the wrapper I consume uses fetch from node 18. Looks like i will have to make a node 18 n8n docker or switch to REST API.

8

Hey @io_io,

That would be it, if you are using n8n in a container we use node 16. We tend to avoid too many other packages and if it is just http calls most nodes will manually implement them

9

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