The idea is:
When developing a workflow that integrates with other services, it would be useful to have a basic set of interactive “console style” network tools like ping, netcat, curl, wget directly in the editor UI to determine whether an n8n node (like HTTP Request) should be expected to work. It isn’t always possible to connect to the n8n runtime environment (e.g. docker exec -ti n8n /bin/sh) to check connectivity, verify open ports, or similar tasks. Many routers have a small set of tools that can be executed within a browser, but “within the context of” the router. n8n’s editor could implement a similar set of tools to help determine if a workflow/node is set up incorrectly or the environment where n8n is running has an issue.
My use case:
Any time a workflow node reports an error that appears to be caused by a network/connectivity problem (timeout, connection refused, etc.), it would be convenient to have a mini-console to do some basic checks from within the n8n runtime environment (i.e. not from the container, vm, or host machine within which n8n is running, but the actual n8n nodejs runtime context).
I think it would be beneficial to add this because:
Sometimes it would be the only way to determine whether a node is functioning correctly or if there is some problem outside of n8n.
Any resources to support this?
Example from Openwrt’s LuCI user interface Network → Diagnostics:
Are you willing to work on this?
Could help refine requirements and/or test.