Broken Update n8n to 2.36.8

[maksanse]

I debugged this on my instance with Claude Code and found what looks like the actual root cause, sharing here in case it helps.

Root cause (confirmed via docker exec):
/home/cloudron inside the container is owned by 998:998 with mode 750:

$ docker exec <cid> ls -lan /home/
drwxr-xr-x 1 998 998 4096 Aug 7 14:46 .
drwxr-x--- 1 998 998 4096 Sep 1 10:59 cloudron

But start.sh runs gosu cloudron:cloudron npm install ... and that user is uid=1000(cloudron) gid=1000(cloudron). Since 998:998 isn't in that user's groups and the dir is 750, UID 1000 has zero traversal access to /home/cloudron - it fails on the very first path component, not just on _cacache ownership. That's also why the chown -R 1000:1000 ~/.npm suggestion in the npm error message doesn't actually help here.

On top of that, /home/cloudron is baked into a read-only image layer: chown as root inside the running container fails with "Read-only file system" on every file under it. So it can't be patched at runtime - it needs a fix in the image build (chown /home/cloudron to 1000:1000 at build time, or align the cloudron user's UID/GID with 998).

Workaround that avoids touching /home/cloudron entirely, added to env.sh:

export NPM_CONFIG_CACHE="/run/n8n/custom-node-modules/.npm-cache"

This redirects npm's cache to a path start.sh already chowns to cloudron:cloudron before running the install step. Confirmed working on my instance - install succeeds and n8n starts normally with this in place.

Hope this saves someone some time, happy for the team to take it from here.

[dsp76]

@girish thanks - I was misled by 2.36.8 vs 4.40.0

[girish]

I have pushed a new update. Can you please check? Tested manually and it works.

[dsp76]

For me 4.40.1 works - thanks!

[DualOSWinWiz]

@girish its working thank you

[Locutus]

@girish, this is not working on my end. Updated an hour ago to 4.41.0.

Sane /home/cloudron/.npm errors.

[girish]

We are looking into this again @locutus , thanks for reporting. Meanwhile, I have revoked the release.

[dacasine]

Same here. Had to roll back. Server is not responding again. Unfortunately old logs disappeared after bankroll - sorry. If I can share something to help please indicate what.

[james]

Hello @dacasine and welcome to the Cloudron forum
We have found the issue https://forum.cloudron.io/post/129181 and will release a new N8N version right away.

[Locutus]

@girish said:

We are looking into this again @locutus , thanks for reporting. Meanwhile, I have revoked the release.

Works. Thanks.