User Management troubles

Questions
#1

I don’t know if I’m the only one encountering this trouble with the new releases but there it is…

n8n (on version 0.168.0 & 0.168.1) instance crashes as soon as I launch it:
It’s self-hosted on heroku and here’s the message I get from the log:

Error: There was an error:
Fatal error setting up user management: no encryption key set.

I had troubles with encryption key therefore I stopped using this years ago.
Don’t tell me I have to put it back.

I tried with and without the Basic Auth, didn’t change anything…

Everything works properly on 0.167.0

#2

I had troubles with encryption key therefore I stopped using this years ago.
Don’t tell me I have to put it back.

Can you please tell me more about that. Because n8n can not work without an encryption key. It gets used to encrypt the credentials. If it does not persist between restarts then the credentials will be unusable (as they can not get decrypted anymore).

#3

Hi @jan

Sure.
I use an environment variable on heroku to set up the encryption key.
And instead of having a value, I just left it blank.

Here is the screenshot

Screenshot 2022-03-15 at 13.56.03
Screenshot 2022-03-15 at 13.56.03709×62 1.83 KB

It was fine until the last two releases.

#4

That is definitely nothing that was ever supposed to happen or should be done. Have not the slightest idea what then goes on underneath the hood and how the functions behave.

In other words, n8n behaves now correctly if it does not allow that.

#5

Thanks for the answer @jan

I made a credential backup.
Removed the Basic Auth,
Added an Encryption Key
Updated to 0.168.1
Filled the signup form
Loaded the credential backup

And everything is back to normal.

  • I now enjoy the User Management system.
1 Like
#6

Thanks a lot for confirming that now everything works fine.

Sorry that we have to be quite strict here but allowing no encryption key would complicate multiple things and on top make n8n less secure. Hope that makes sense.

Have fun!