Public read-only URL for workflow

Hey all, strange request perhaps but here goes.

We see automations/integrations as organisational business, and anything that builds transparency and accessibility into the organisational machinery is a win for the democracy of your org. Digital literacy is critical.

It would be amazing if n8n was able to expose read-only workflows to non-logged in users. This would exclude credentials, almost certaintly, but basically allow anyone with the URL to grok what is actually going on under the hood.

Example: I would love to embed a visualisation of my organisation’s n8n workflows into our Notion.so handbook pages.

I’m envisioning a fairly typical “share” UI for this at a workflow-level. Here’s an example from Metabase.com:

If folders and things like that come along, I would love to see this functionality rolled out to that too, so you can make public a whole bundle of workflows relating to a specific domain.

If this sounds a bit niche and unlikely to be developed in-house, can I get a temperature check on whether a PR like this would be accepted?

Hi @janbaykara!

Thanks for the idea and kicking off this thread!

You present some very intriguing scenarios here and I see it as broadly useful in multiple contexts. Great stuff!

By employing a pattern like Google docs sharing (“anyone with the link” etc), it could be easily configured for very public scenarios but also simply internal org needs (like confluence/ notion docs). So from my perspective, I don’t believe this is altogether too niche :slight_smile:

This comes at a good time - we’ve broken ground on the User Management feature (currently researching and defining) and that would provide much of the foundation to enable a “share” pattern similar to popular content tools. I believe it’s unlikely that read-only URLs/ public sharing could be included in the V1 User Management feature, given how much ground must be covered for it already.

While the spec is in progress for UM feature, it’s likely to have roles/ permissions and so any sort of public sharing functionality could piggyback off of that. I should be able to give you a better answer on whether or not this feature could make it into an immediate roadmap once we’ve completed User Management. Also, excited to say we’ll have more bandwidth on the Product team in the next weeks (onboardings in progress :grin:) and User Management is one of our big priorities atm, so can say this is actively being worked on.

Once UM is out, in the case that we cannot place public sharing on our immediate roadmap; it’s very likely we’d welcome a PR on this! Regarding PRs, this is going to be one of the topics we’re assessing in Q2 - how do we give users more confidence that more major PRs will be accepted; so I expect that by the time UM is out, we’ll have more clarity on that front as well.

I’ll be posting progress on User Management here: User and Privilege Management [GOT CREATED] - #7 by jan

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