Viewing live data in a workflow

Hi there, I’m having issues working with viewing data sent into a workflow.

My setup:

  1. Docker install behind nginx reverse proxy. (took a bit of research to get it working properly)
  2. Github push trigger
  3. If node to filter
  4. Webhook output

The issue I’m having is that I can manually run the github trigger, or just trigger from github, but while I once saw data that came in, now I just get "Entries exist but they do not contain any JSON data. "
This makes setting up the If node nearly impossible as I can’t preview/access the data sent in via webhook.

Also possibly semi related, it appears that the github trigger doesn’t add itself to github, so I ended up having to manually copy the webhook url and adding it on github. Is that intentional? I feel like I could do the same thing with incoming webhooks rather than using my github token/etc.

What I would love to see would be something similar to how Zapier lets you view about 3 examples of the incoming data so you can use it to fill out your secondary steps rather than guess by trial and error.

Update: I created a new workflow and did some things differently:

  1. I didn’t use the github webhook. I’m not sure why it shows but apparently the API calls do the job. This makes more sense.
  2. Unlike with the webhook, there isn’t a way to force a test call on github, so I had to just make a live commit. (I’m watching for commits rather than stars)

The point about being similar to Zapier with more than one example or a record of multiple submissions would be good to have.

Hello!

Yes, I can imagine that creating a workflow like that is not a lot of fun and very hard work!

But it should actually not be. What you described should already be working like here in this tutorial:

So I guess something is still wrong in your setup or the way you are testing. Normally I would assume that the external webhook URL is maybe still localhost, does so get added as localhost to Github and can so not trigger the call on your n8n instance. But because you wrote that if you copy the URL manually it works I guess that can not be it. So the only thing I can think of right now is really the usage. Please have a look at the video I did post above. That maybe helps.

Be aware that the webhook URL gets only set on GitHub when:

  • The workflow is active (so in production mode)
  • Testing is currently going on. So only in the time between you pressing “Execute Workflow” and it says “Waiting for Webhook-Call” till the first call gets received. Afterward that Test-Webhook gets removed again automatically

I hope that helps!

blue skies

Jan

Thanks for the comment. I’m still a bit confused, as mentioned in my second message, I created a second workflow and it ended up working. I have also noticed issues where some workflows just plain don’t work. In one testing workflow zero outbound webhooks and slack calls were working. When executing individual nodes they would just hang. I thought slack didn’t work, then went with a webhook which also didn’t work. Then I compared it against another workflow with exactly the same settings. Finally I created a brand new workflow and everything worked.

Hm that could also be a connection issue. Did you check the nginx configuration here: