Workflow Agents tab visible in 2.31.x self-hosted but backend not functional — AGENTS_MODULE_NAMES is empty

Questions
1

Title: Workflow Agents tab visible in 2.31.x self-hosted but backend not functional — AGENTS_MODULE_NAMES is empty

Body:

We’re running n8n 2.31.2 self-hosted (Enterprise license, Docker, SQLite) and noticed the Workflow Agents tab appeared in the UI after upgrading from 2.11.3. However no agents can be created and the feature appears non-functional on self-hosted.

After digging into the source we found the root cause:

// @n8n/config/dist/configs/agents.config.js
exports.AGENTS_MODULE_NAMES = [];  // empty — no valid module tokens registered

This means setting N8N_AGENTS_MODULES to anything throws:

Unknown agents module: "...". No agents modules are currently supported.

We also tried the instance-ai module (N8N_ENABLED_MODULES=instance-ai) which loads successfully and wires to a local LiteLLM/OpenAI-compatible endpoint via N8N_AI_ASSISTANT_BASE_URL, but there is no UI entry point for it since the Workflow Agents tab backend isn’t registered.

Questions:

  1. Is AGENTS_MODULE_NAMES intentionally empty for self-hosted in 2.31.x, or is this a packaging oversight?
  2. Is there a planned release date or version where Workflow Agents will be available on self-hosted Enterprise?
  3. Is instance-ai the correct module to enable for the “build workflows via chat” use case, or is that a separate feature entirely?
  4. Any workaround to enable the agent builder on self-hosted before GA?

Confirmed empty on both 2.31.2 and 2.31.3 (tested by inspecting the config file inside the container).

Information on your n8n setup

  • **n8n version:**2.31.2
  • **Database (default: SQLite):**sqllite
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • **Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):**docker self hosted with self hosted nvidia nims
  • Operating system: aws linux
2

Thanks for letting us know about this, We have created CV-4 as the internal dev ticket to look into it.