/* MINDFIRE BLOG */

I’m going to do some blog posts about using n8n to build an AI workflow. Consistent with our ‘open sourced’ / low-cost approach to Artificial Intelligence, I’m going to use the self-hosted community edition of n8n. This blog post will walk you through how to do the installation, in my case, for Windows. (Though it should work more or less the same for other operating systems.)

What is n8n?

n8n is a workflow-automation platform: it lets you connect apps, services, databases and APIs together, and automate sequences of tasks. It has a visual interface that lets you connect nodes together in a workflow graph:

This may sound somewhat similar to Deepset’s Haystack and there is some overlap of functionality. For example, Haystack also has a graphical interface available to create its pipelines and it can also chain together nodes that call services. However, n8n can be used for any kind of workflow because n8n offers extensive API integrations to services (like Slack or Google Sheets) whereas Haystack is more oriented specifically to integration with tools like PostgreSQL and pgvector or elastic search as well as various Large Language Models. In other words, n8n is more general purpose and Haystack is more oriented towards AI.

Consistent with Mindfire’s goal of finding low-cost AI solutions, I am going to go over how to install the self-hosted version of n8n using the free community edition. (Github repo found here.) Though other versions are available including a paid plan hosted by n8n. This edition uses a fair-code license, so it is free to use.

If you want to learn more, this quick start guide is a great place to start. The n8n website includes a number of text and video courses to bring you up to speed.

Installing n8n Locally

First, if you don’t already have it installed, you’ll need Node.js. See this blog post for details on how to install node.js.

Next, we need to install n8n itself. Go to this page for details.

I’ll walk you through my own install of n8n onto a Windows machine.

For Windows, open “Terminal” to get a Powershell command prompt.

For our purposes we want to do the global install, so at the command prompt type:

npm install n8n -g

You’ll see an install take place:

Notice at the end that you have a localhost url:

http://localhost:5678

Run that in a browser and you’ll get the n8n web interface running locally and you’ll get a registration screen:

Go ahead and register and create a password. There will be a few extra screens you’ll have to pass through the first time such as answering a survey:

Finally, you’ll get to the actual n8n screen:

You have now installed n8n and you’re ready to go with the community edition.