Before the publish/unpublish going live change we only needed to activate the parent workflow and any sub-workflows or error workflows called by the parent didn’t need to be activated.
Now with the new publish/unpublish going live process should all dependent workflows be published or again just publishing the parent is enough?
@anestorova publish everything in your dependency chain to be safe, especially error workflows.
Publishing the parent is enough for sub-workflows called via the Execute Workflow node they’re triggered by ID at runtime, not triggered independently, so n8n just runs whatever the latest saved version is regardless of publish state
@anestorova same rules as before, just new naming. sub-workflows called via Execute Workflow dont need to be published — the parent runs them directly. error workflows DO need to be published because they need an active trigger listening for the error event. is this for a specific case that broke, or just confirming before u publish a parent?
barn4k’s screenshot captures the current behavior exactly. As of recent versions, n8n validates the entire dependency chain at publish time - so sub-workflows called via Execute Workflow must also be published, not just active. The same applies to error workflows since they need an active trigger to catch error events. The short rule: publish everything in the chain before you publish the parent.
