n8n.io - Zappier, IFTTT, Integromat alternative

[msbt]

Hey @jimcavoli, good job with n8n, I've cloned your repo and played around a little. For whatever reason the basic auth wasn't working out of the box, so I added ENV N8N_CONFIG_FILES="/app/data/.n8n/config" to the Dockerfile. Now auth works, but as soon as you restart the app for the first time, it won't come up anymore with that errormessage: Error: configuration param 'encryptionKey' not declared in the schema. It only gets back online after removing the encryptionKey entry in /app/data/.n8n/config and triggering another restart (which then again sets a new/different encryptionKey ).

Any idea what's that about, or how did you get auth to work? It just ignores my settings without that env variable. If it's not set, restarts work, but auth does not.

A quick fix was to add another env var ENV N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY="123" to make the encryption key static (still had to delete it before restarting, but it sets the static one afterwards), else all saved credentials were unusable after restart and changed encryptionKey. Oviously that's not a solution, but at least I could test a little.

Other than that (and updating to the latest version, base image and some minor tweaks) it seems to be working fine!

edit: not able to get webhooks to work, not sure if it's me or n8n

[imc67]

Today IFTTT announced that they will charge you $10 a month (!!!!) for their service. Maybe now it’s really time to put Cloudron in a unique position with this app?!

[girish]

@imc67 Interesting. So existing free users have to pay or are they grand fathered?

[imc67]

@girish https://ifttt.com/plans
Create 3 Applets of your own
Turn on unlimited Applets

[jdaviescoates]

@imc67 looks like perhaps there was a backlash, can now "set your price" starting at $1.99/mo

[imc67]

Got an email a few minutes ago from IFTTT;

Note: the free-forever IFTTT Standard plan no longer supports creating unlimited Applets from scratch.

To date, you’ve created more than 3 Applets. If you do not upgrade to Pro, all but 3 of your created Applets will be archived.

[jdaviescoates]

@imc67 yeah, I've got the same thing.

Most significantly, I think, is the last sentence:

Your current plan, the free-forever IFTTT Standard plan, no longer supports creating unlimited Applets from scratch.

To date, you’ve created more than 3 Applets. If you do not upgrade to Pro before October 7th, all but 3 of your custom Applets will be automatically archived.

For more information about archived Applets, see What happens if I do not upgrade to IFTTT Pro?

Through October 7th, you may set the monthly price you want to pay to upgrade to Pro and we’ll honor it forever.

Seems the Set your price options I mentioned above will likely disappear on October 7th... So I guess if you use IFTTT a lot it might be a good idea to pay $1.99/mo now (I actually hardly ever use it these days so think I'll just use self-hosted alternatives once they've been packaged for Cloudron).

[A Former User]

Would definitely be interested in this. Specifically, my use-case is building my own smart light switches. Id have the buttons hooked up to microcontrollers that send requests to something like IFTTT or n8n off of a webhook trigger to turn lights on/off.

[mehdi]

@atrilahiji For this I suggest installing home-assistant locally on something like a raspberry pi, locally. I actually just installed such a system at my place

[girish]

I looked into this a bit. Did I get it right that this app only supports basic auth? That's kinda worrying. I am surprised though given that it seems to have a lot of github stars atleast.

[A Former User]

Thats what im seeing. Being able to use LDAP for this would be a godsend but I didnt find info on using LDAP with it. RIP the IFTTT alternative dream?

[marcusquinn]

Just chatting with @murgero to look at this. Please pledge some sponsorship if you want, and to respectfully keep devs fed for finishing what we can't: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3380/sponsoring-n8n

[jimcavoli]

It may end up that Huginn is the better option. Not sure, but that's a Ruby/Rails app too (my primary speciality) so perhaps I can look at getting that packaged so a bit of comparison can begin. Honestly not sure where that rings in on my priority list for the time being though. Reasonably low through the early parts of next year, likely.

[marcusquinn]

@jimcavoli happy to sponsor if you do. We did trial it and ended up sticking with NodeRED.

TBH, with ETL tools, it's inevitable to use multiple as the time-saving from having read-made connectors offsets the cost of having different automations in different tools, hence we still run 4 and would likely hedge bets, continuing to use each for their advantages than limiting ourselves to just one.

[marcusquinn]

@jimcavoli Nice work and insight. Does this development change anything for your view on the limitations of basic auth? https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3682/proxyauth-addon

As far as "Some stuff only works in Chrome". I guess that covers all Chromiums, as I tend to use Vivaldi in those cases.

As with all these Apps, I can get some developer assistance if we need to also contribute direct to the apps themselves, so it's always worth having them available in the App Store as "Unstable" so we can review these things and contribute upstream with sponsorship or dev-time as well if necessary.

[jimcavoli]

@marcusquinn Yeah, maybe the new auth wall is enough. Haven't tried adding it to this packaging yet, but that could be a reasonable solution, since this is otherwise fairly ready to go and has a lot of asks.

[marcusquinn]

@jimcavoli think you could pick this up for a little sponsoring contribution? I think @murgero has other understandable priorities at the mo, so I prefer not to chase.

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3380/sponsoring-n8n

We have can jump in and start using and looking at core contributions as well once it's running and we can battle test. We have more devs on our team that can get into packaging but right now they are all flat-out on a bunch of systems migrations.

[mehdi]

I think this one should just wait for Cloudron@6 and use the integrated proxyAuth. It does not seem reasonable to come up with a custom solution just to roll-back in a few weeks

[marcusquinn]

@mehdi fair enough. I'm working on getting more Dev attention to help on Cloudron stuff too, takes a little time but as soon as anyone gets involved they do see the light

[jimcavoli]

I'm reworking this now that 6 is out and proxyAuth is an option. Currently got the latest version building and running on the latest node. Waiting for some details on how to do proxyAuth configuration to not break webhooks (rather important for this one!) and then I'll need to get to fixing up the websockets, but overall is looking okay. Switching from file-based to env-based configuration only because it seems better supported by the docs as well.