I just ran into a major error that took my whole instance down. here’s a lil postmortem. I tried to install a community node that had package dependencies – n8n-nodes-pdf2image
I was just banging thru stuff and figured I’d pop out to the server and install the poppler-utils package after the node. That was a MASSIVE mistake. The npm page for the node does indicate the dependencies, but doesn’t indicate an order of operations.
Out on the server, I tried to update first. At this point, I had no idea what was wrong. Updated, but the entire instance was still reporting 502
Next, I checked the status of the running processes
\> docker ps -a
That showed me the server was running, but the n8n instance was stuck in a reboot loop. That started me thinking that the node without its dependencies was the issue.
Next I tried installing the dependency via Dockerfile. Still 502.
Finally, I removed the node. It was a bit of a slag to find the dir.
\> docker volume ls
DRIVER VOLUME NAME
local n8n_data
local …
\> docker run --rm -v n8n_data:/n8n_data ubuntu:latest bash -c “ls -lA /n8n_data”
d——— 3 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Oct 25 00:02 nodes
lather, rinse, repeat until I found the modules dir. once I had the right path, I used this command to nuke the bad node
\> docker run --rm -v n8n_data:/n8n_data ubuntu:latest bash -c “rm -rf /n8n_data/nodes/node_modules/n8n-nodes-pdf2image”
after pulling out the Dockerfile ref in my config,
\> docker compose up -d
put us back in action. be safe out there.