How To Set Up N8N Self Hosting In 3 Minutes (6 Ways)

hey in this video I'm going to show you how to set up naden self-hosting in just 3 minutes and then I'm going to show you five other ways to do so as well this works if you are an nadn beginner an naden Pro or anywhere in between I'm going to walk you through the process and even sign up and pay for the services so that you guys can get this unadulterated view of how all this works as possible that sounds good to you let's get into it the first and simplest way to self-host is using render for those of you that are unfamiliar they call themselves the fastest path to production for a reason now I'm not affiliated with them but I'll show you how you can get up and running with render in just a couple of minutes this is easily the simplest way to go ahead and do so first things first just create an account over here now I already have an account so I'm just going to put in a fake one here fake email address and the fake password we're going to click create account they're going to ask you to verify your email next now since I've already gone through and done all of the signup I can then go and then sign in so I'm going to sign in with my account after you are done verifying your email you'll be taken to a screen that looks like this it'll say deploy a service static site postgress database or explore all service types now unlike a lot of the other videos here I'm actually signed up to the service I'm actually going to be paying when I need to but I want to let you guys know that like you know the these videos tend to be invalidated pretty quickly because all of the platforms that we are signing up for self-hosting on they all tend to have different uis and uxs and they change the way that their dashboards look and stuff so instead of paying attention to the very specific buttons I'm clicking and stuff like that just try to understand um what I'm doing more generally so what you're going to want to do is find an area in the page that says deploy a service and then go down to where it says existing image what you're going to need to do is you're just going to paste this in verbatim so NN has a deployment method called Docker is just a very simple and easy way to grab like an image of the nadn install off of the internet so if you just Google you know n8n Docker like I'm doing here you'll get a page that looks something like this on the docker Hub and if you just scroll down you'll find a URL that looks something like this docker. io n/ in this is just what you copy then you go back to render and just paste it in where it says image URL up here then you click connect I'm going to leave everything else as blank and I'm going to click on free for hobby projects in reality what you're probably going to want to do is you're going to want to launch a starter a standard or Pro Plan depending on your usage if you are doing thousands of requests a minute Pro is probably uh sufficient for you if you're just getting up and running and maybe have like two or three clients or two or three um you know systems that you're maintaining that send workflows every few minutes starter is sufficient for you if you do free just note that they'll automatically spin down the service this can be kind of a pain in the butt but I'll just leave it at that once you're done it's going to go through it's actually going to spin up the docker image and you're going to set up your server so let me cut in a second by the way it was on this website that I first found what NN actually means it was written by the Creator himself and he says that it means node mation and it is pronounced as n8n apparently the reason why was he just didn't really like typing a ton of characters so he said n8n node mation good enough okay and then after a couple minutes you're going to get a message that looks something like this with editor being accessible in this Local Host all you need to do is go up here to the link give it a click and then you'll have the ability to set up your owner account so that's what I'm going to do here and once I'm done going to click next this will then send a verification email using my server actually which is interesting do some fun little onboarding heard about yall through Google then we actually have the ability um and this may not necessarily be the case when you guys are watching but as of the time this recording we have the ability to get a bunch of paid features for free with a license key so I've already done this on a bunch of other ones I'm going to skip it but yeah now naden is here we could start any workflow we want from scratch this is running entirely in our own server you'll see that because it's a free server it's going to be a little bit slower than usual um but all hot Keys everything you could possibly want works and because you're using a Docker image it's going to be up toate so this is by far the simplest and easiest way to get up and running with this I should note that um if you want to like this isn't the only way to set up NAD end on render and we've also glossed over a fair number of like the configuration options that you have if you want to check out some of those configuration options feel free to check um the nend docker page there are variety that allow you to like switch the database that you're using by modifying environment variables and changing basically a bunch of things related to encrypting and so on and so forth if you also look at the nadn community environment variables and just pump that into Google you'll find a bunch of different settings that people use to optimize their an and installs um but that's just beyond the course of this video the second simplest way to set up naden in a self-hosted environment is using Railway now for those of you that don't know Railway is very similar to render and that allows you to very quickly and easily spin up servers and spin up um databases for those servers but ours our signup here is going to be a little bit different to what we're were doing before we're actually going have to continue with GitHub for those of you that are unaware GitHub is a way to host your code or Repository that you've worked on make a

long story short all you need to do to make sure that this method works is spin up a GitHub profile and I believe you have to add some authentication so github. com we just open this in an incognito tab you guys can see what it would look like when you do not have an account then click sign up over here add your credentials as necessary in order to get that account up and running then all you have to do is go back and authorize your rail Railway app this will give you $5 in free trial credits as of the time of this recording and now we have an account here that I just have to accept a bunch of terms for then move on to deploy a template the one you're going to want to click is nadn with workers it's currently the most popular one um on the platform then just type in deploy and basically what's going on now is we're using our $5 in free trial credit to spin up and N an instance with uh workers which are just a little addition and I believe it's a post CR database with Reedus Rus I don't really know how you pronounce that but the specifics of the implementation aren't super under aren't necessary to know or understand until you actually get up and running with n so the purpose of this is just to make sure that you have an NN self-hosted instance we can actually access it using a public URL so let's que up some Jeopardy music and let's see how things go at a certain point you'll get a page that looks something like this all of these will turn green this is the actual deployment process and it'll say it's applying a bunch of changes you'll get updates on the right hand column here that show you that various deployments were done so in my case it started with Reedus then it went to postres and it's kind of working its way backwards over to the primary in add an instance before finishing off with the worker eventually all of these nodes will have green little check marks associated with them and all I have to do is go back to primary then give this URL a click it'll open up your nadn instance same as we had before and I can go through and I can add all of the information that I want and because it's a new instance obviously it's asking me to go through the onboarding um again and so this is going to happen every time that you set up a new instance it's going to offer to give me paid features for free forever um and then voila you know we're basically good to go again we have our nadn instance up and running the third simplest way to get nadn up and running in a self-hosted environment is using digital ocean they have a oneclick nadn install template very simple easy and straightforward you just type in digital ocean into Google and this will be one of the first hits I'm going to sign up to an account here from scratch show you guys what it looks like so just pumping in my email address and my password I like digital oceans design very nice it's now going to do some bot verification just to make sure that I'm a real human being and once we are in digital ocean we're going to have to go through our confirmation sequence and we have some onboarding that I'm very quickly going to get up and running and then once we're here you do have to enter in uh some payment details so in my case I'm going to enter some payment details just to secure the account I'm going to do that off screen of course okay great and now we are registered in digital ocean and in order to get all this stuff up and running it's very easy all I'm going to want to do is go over to the digital ocean um I believe it's called their Marketplace or their store so go back over here let me go I think it's Marketplace there we go what we want to do is we want to click on or search for n8n be a oneclick install all we're going to do is create an nadn droplet it's now going to connect back to our account we can select the specific server error we want um just select whatever is closest to you it should automatically do this and then it should automatically select an Ubuntu version in my case it's 22. 041 cents an hour I should say now you're going to have to create a root password so I'm going to do this here looks like it needs to be a little bit longer H uh one uppercase letter o man this is tough oh geez uh why don't we just go you okay that's rough so I'm totally going to forget that so YouTu three that sounds good face that puppy in there I'm going to very securely on YouTube where everybody could see it and then we're going to create the droplet now this is going to do the whole deploy procedure similar to like how we you know what we've seen before very same idea it's just going to obfuscate or obscure some of that data from you digital ocean I find is just a little bit less I don't know they put that stuff a little less front and center um it's also an older platform versus something like Railway or render which is focused a lot more on uh obviously you know user experience and being modern and stuff like that so we're going to give it a few minutes and

let it finish okay and then your droplet should be up and running the issue in digital Ocean and the reason why this is like third instead of first is because you can't just access it via the ipv4 the IP address paste it in you'll have some issue it refuse to connect so what you have to do instead is you have to actually add this to a domain um using DNS what I'll show you guys how to do here is on my own left click. I go to Advanced DNS here then add an a record the host is going to be NAD then the IP address this and I'm just going to try and do this as quickly as possible so click 1 minute what this is going to do is it's going to provide me a publicly accessible URL at n8n doy domain name. a that routes to this address here so if you don't have this um you're going to have an error every time you try and access the IB the ipv4 which is the IP address so I'm going to give it a minute and then I'm going to access n. left click. after that all we need to do is go to console here give that a click it'll open up this window which looks pretty scary and make you feel like a computer hacker all I have to do is press enter in the domain name enter in whatever the email address you want to use for their encryption protocol is and then um I'm just going to not set up a time zone it's actually going to go through and run some additional configuration options for us so here it is it's now building this out once you're done it'll say installation complete access your new idend server on a browser to continue at this address so I'm going to copy that over go back here open up a new tab and as you can see we now have the owner account screen same as we had before we can set it up it's going to ask us some onboarding info and um voila you can now go in and then you know muck around on your canvas again the fourth way to set up nadn in a self-hosted environment is using Heroku now if you just Google Heroku spelled h e r o KU you get to a website like this Heroku is definitely a lot older of a platform you can see they have some updates that are coming so maybe that has Chang as of the time of this recording but we will type in naden Heroku what you want is you want this GitHub repo here or GitHub repo that looks something like it now GitHub actually is a native deploy to Heroku button so what you can actually do is you just click this button and then it'll deploy it to Heroku they've done some updates over the course of the last three months I should note that every time we're doing this we're getting slightly different versions of nadn and stuff but if you click on that button you'll then be taken to Heroku where you can log into to an account which I have yet to do so I'm actually sign up to an account that's what I'm doing here uh no company so enter your email again and I am in the United States let's say Delaware now creating my account so we're going to check my email like I did a moment ago okay now we have to add a bunch more info um and it looks like you have to make your password super long okay now we have to enter some uh two-factor authentication I don't really know what I want to do here um onetime authenticator yeah that's probably what I'm going to do and then have to go and download an app called authenticator from the um Google Play store or the Apple Store the way that this works is it'll basically just generate a code based off of the current date and time multiplied by some secret key thing that uh Heroku has installed then what it allow you to do is you're actually going to be able to scan it using um something that looks just like this and basically you put in your little QR code in that Center area here which is what I'm doing and it's just giv me a verification code that I can now pump in which will be this there are multiple different authenticator apps you could use whichever one floats your boat I like using the Google Authenticator one just simpler and easier for me okay now we have some more onboarding questions just to go through when this puppy finally loads that is am I domiciled in Italy no awesome okay great so now once we're signed in we can go back to that n8n Heroku GitHub install click deploy to Heroku and it'll actually just do that one click deploy for us going to call this n8n Nick common runtime and I'm going to dismiss this and then the only things that we have to do is are we have to change the encryption key so it to what ever the heck we want I'm going to do um I don't know Nick is super awesome and jacked all true um and then the app name is going to be the Heroku application name which is naden Nick so nn- Nick cool and we click deploy beautiful as this is a one-click deploy all of the configuration settings are just up on their own so as you can see there's some config vars here these are the same things as the environment variables and render um and then Railway that we you saw earlier but I'm just

going to let it play and we'll see what happens great you're going to get a bunch of green check marks as per usual and then we're just going to go view now because we don't have um like https installed basically and Heroku is a little bit behind all the stuff you're probably going to get a dangerous site where you're going to want to do is go visit this unsafe site down here it'll actually take you to the page and as you can see there's no real difference in the uh that's okay um any of the safety here um it's just like it's your own website they're just lacking the protocol that we'd be interested in so yeah um voila we are now on our website we're going to go software business owner myself um less than 20 people and then Google as per usual and we got some paid features and then blah we can now start from scratch all over again with our naden install self host number four the next way to self host naden is actually just do it on your own computer using Docker uh you can do so on like your laptop or maybe have some server Rack or something like that I don't necessarily recommend this unless you know what you are doing but I'm putting it in here just for completeness sake what you're going to want to do is just head over to doer. it'll allow you to download the docker desktop version now I have an apple silicon Mac so I'm going to give this a click this is then going to go through the download process once I'm done with that I have my Docker DMG image again this is going to be different if you're running a um I don't know like a Mac or a PC or something make sure to download the right one for your version in my case I'm copying this over to the applications folder which takes its sweet ass time then after that you can just search for Docker whatever way that you are currently interacting with your filefinder that's how I do mine it'll verify the package yes I want to open the package that is why I double clicked you and then uh you can accept and then use these advanced settings my case I need to enter my password to do so okay great so um you can sign in you know through go through the whole rig rule if you want to like creating an account and stuff I'm just going to skip all this and what you want is up here where it says search you're just going on paste in not that um just look for nadn so nadn IO nadn is right over here so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to click pull that'll go through um setting this up on your own uh computer basically and once you've pulled it you're going to want to run it now I should note that you can do this through terminal as well you don't need to necessarily do this just through like the docker desktop is just a much easier way of getting up and running with this and then you're actually going to want to instantiate this by clicking run and when you do so It'll ask you for some optional settings I'm going to do 5 6 78 right over here volumes host path environment variables I'm just going to leave that as is and I'll just do nn- Nick going to give that a run and you'll see that you know my computer is a lot faster than a lot of the other ones we've been using so it's already done with the deploy if you click 567 78 you'll now be at localhost 5678 setup which is again my own server and now I'm actually running nadn directly on my computer so because I have way more server resources than you know most of those ones that I could rent out realistically I bought like one of the swankier MacBooks um you know everything here is going to run way faster than you know if I were to do so using some sort of cloud instance you also need to keep in mind I'm not um I don't have to send and receive data it's actually just all locally here I could see this making sense for people that want to play around with like higher end applications I'm just keep in mind that this does complicate the process quite a bit because now you know you your web hook URLs are all local now if you want to um find a way to expose right if I go back here if I take web hook but you'll see that we can't currently access this so if you want to I'm actually going to go back to my Docker container I'll stop it if I click Start here sorry if I click delete here so we're going to want to find the nadn io latest again um sorry n iio this one uh we can pull it if we want but in my case I'm going to click run what I want to set the web hook uncore URL to this and then the host Port I'm just going to leave at 5678 we'll call this nn- Nick again so now when I run this after it uh gets up and running I'll have access to my local host setup again so let me just go through the riger roll of the signup and now if I need to find a way to automate this just given how many times I'm signing up to all these no thank you now if I start from scratch and I add a web hook URL what you'll see here is it automatically puts in um this address now this still isn't enough to make it accessible what we need to do is we need to find a way to pass in uh basically um requests from nn- nick. left click. to our local ENT instance and that specific thing is beyond the purpose of this tutorial essentially what you're going to have to do is set up ngg NX which is a basically an HTTP web server that makes it so that when you send a request over to that address um it'll automatically forward

it over to your local host on your machine but there's a ton of great documentation written on all this stuff on naden um feel free to check out configuration environment variables and then if you just type naden engins right over here it'll show you guys well there variety of like answers direct from the founder of naden himself that walk you guys through what that process looks like the last way I'm going to show you on how to set up an in a self-hosted environment easily and quickly is using hostinger for those of you that are unfamiliar hostinger is very similar to the other tools that I mentioned here um they just kind of hold your hand through the process a little bit more so if you just type in n8n and then hostinger up here it'll take you to this page there's a one-click VPS template which will get you up and running quickly um these are the prices on a 24-month term but when you click on it you'll actually be able to select a uh a smaller term if you want so period 24 months let's go down to one month here I'm going to click on continue it's obviously then going to ask me to create an account and do all my pricing information and stuff but let's do this one okay good to go we're now going to click get started that's going to take us to our H panel is just like the hostinger panel and we have a guided setup here I'm going to choose just the default options because they walk you through it fair amount the template that I'm looking for is n8n so that's the one that you're going to want to do it will launch um it will ask you to set up some malware scanning BS I never do that and then you do have to set up a root password of some kind it'll be the same sort of idea as before well looks pretty good to me oh 12 to 50 characters can I just double this up yes I can we have the VPS host name we have an SSH key which I don't really need just going to save all the stuff all this looks good to me I'm going to click finish setup and it's going to run through the process now of setting up my VPS after that you'll get a message saying the VPS is ready we'll click manage VPS here um it's going to obviously ask us some fun stuff thank you for the onboarding then we have to do is head to panel access click on login URL and this will take us to our lovely hopefully familiar at this point um nadn signup page and then from there you can proceed through the onboarding as I've done five times already click get started skip the paid features trial and then you are now good to go we are in the canvas I hope you guys appreciated enjoyed this video showing you how to set up self-hosting in both 3 minutes and then using progressively longer and more complicated methods I guess hostinger is probably less comp complicated than self-hosting actually but we'll see um if you guys have any questions about the self-hosting setup or how any of the stuff works just drop them down below and if you guys have any questions or suggestions for future videos that you guys want me to do then please add that as well I get most of my video ideas and requests at this point for my audience so means a lot every time one of you guys chimes in aside from that please like subscribe do all that fun YouTube stuff check out my communities maker school and make money with make if you want to make money with Automation and I'll catch you on the next video