Remove Account Owner and deactivate User Management

Describe the issue/error/question

Hi,

is there a way to remove the user management if an Account Owner has already been created?

It accidentally happened that the Update for user management got into our instance today and I’m currently trying to find the person who activated the Account owner but in general I would like to remove the user management as the feature will currently not work for us.

So is there any way to remove the Account owner if it has been created and deactivate the feature afterward?

Thank you very much.

BR
Benjamin

1 Like

Hey @Benjamin_Exner, I am afraid there is no way to simply disable the user management functionality after creating an owner account. As per the docs setting N8N_USER_MANAGEMENT_DISABLED=true would not have any effect:

Defaults to user management enabled (false). Set to true to disable the user management feature. Note that n8n ignores this environment variable if you have already set up an owner account.

So you’d essentially need to roll back to a state before enabling user management and make sure to then set N8N_USER_MANAGEMENT_DISABLED=true. Do you have database backups from that time?

If not, you could export workflows and credentials (via CLI commands such as n8n export:credentials --all --decrypted and n8n export:workflow --all), then create a fresh n8n instance without user management enabled and import the previously exported workflows/credentials. You’d loose old workflow execution logs in the process though.

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Hi @MutedJam ,

thank you for the quick reply. We are currently looking if we have an image from close before the update as well. :crossed_fingers:

We also already found the person who accidentally got ownership so we have at least access to the ui for now while checking the backups on the server.

One question related to the Exports, if we export the Workflows, we have to remember which ones are currently active right? Just to be on the safe side if we have to recreate everything again.

Hi, just a closing comment.

We did not find an Image but thanks to the reply of @MutedJam we were able to export everything and just switch the database of n8n so that user management is properly deactivated now and we could upgrade to the newest version of N8N.

Thank you so much for the help!

BR

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What’s about n8n user-management:reset? Would it do the same, without having to start fresh?

Just to save you the trouble: I just tested, and it did not. :slight_smile:

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