I’m really surprised there isn’t a native SFTP Trigger node in N8N. This is definitely something I would like to see added, especially for an automation tool.
The ability to start a workflow when a new file has been uploaded/changed on an SFTP site is very important to Enterprise Businesses, that deal with HR/Financial csv files all the time.
The node should provide flexible polling intervals, as well as wildcards for filenames.
We may have an SFTP site that gets all sorts of file dumped to it. The node should be able to be configured to look at only specific files while ignoring others.
Example:
We only want files that start with “HR_Feed*.csv” as configure for the trigger node.
As an example would expect to pick up files daily such as:
HR_Feed_20260130.csv
HR_Feed_20260201.csv
But would ignore any other files in the directory, as there may be other workflows or existing business processes that process those differently.
Lastly, the trigger node having the ability to either move the file to another folder(ie: /Processed), delete it, or do nothing once detected would be a great addition.