Get started with n8n.cloud (Part 1)

welcome to n8n cloud in this series of videos we'll teach you the basics of workflow design in nan i'm starting out here on my n8n cloud dashboard and the first step is to open our instance

now when you open your instance you always open onto a blank canvas this is the editor canvas here where we can build our workflows and on the left hand side we can access existing workflows save our workflow and then also access our credential manager where you can add your logins for the various apps and services that you use as well as an execution log to check out previous executions when you're troubleshooting

and then on the right hand side is where we add nodes um whenever you open up on a blank canvas we always start with a start node here and this is an example of a trigger node in nan so trigger nodes kick off workflows now the start node is special in that it can't be deleted and it's most useful when you're creating your workflow because any nodes you have connected to it you can just click this execute workflow button to start those off now in this example we're going to add the slack node from this right hand panel it's a regular node that we want to add because we're not waiting for something to happen in the slack ecosystem to start our workflow we instead just want to set it up to send a message to a channel so we'll click on the slack node here

the first thing i'm going to do is close this just to show how we connect them to a trigger node so in this case i'm grabbing this and connecting it here so now once i set up the slack node and hit execute workflow our start trigger will simply start it won't create any data or bring anything in from a third-party app and then our slack node will run here so the first thing we do to set up a

node is the credentials for it so we need to know what account to log into for most nodes there's various authentication types in the case of slack we have access token which is an api token or oauth 2. now i do recommend trying oauth2 when you're using a node because most of the time in n8n cloud this is going to mean a click pop-up experience where you can easily sign in so now that i've selected oauth2

i can click this drop-down and create a new credential here we're going to give the credential name i usually go with the email that the account is for so it's easy to reference later and then from there we're going to click this connection button here which opens up the slack pop-up we're going to allow access and now we're connected now this nodes with access here is useful when you're connecting something like a google credential and you want to control the access between nodes in this case we just need the slack to have access to this and we'll save it um once you've set up the credentials on node the rest of the setup is really you're setting up what the step that node is going to do and that's usually a combination of selecting the resource and the operation you want to apply on that resource so by resource we mean objects in the slack system so in this case we could manipulate a channel a file a message etc we do want to post a message so we'll click that and then the operation here that we'd like to do is to post the message not updated now the channel that we'll post to will be general and the text that we want to post in this case we'll do a static message for now this is a message so now that we've added a message let's test out that we've set up this node correctly and we can do that by clicking this execute node button here so we've gotten a response back from slack let's check over here in the channel just sent this as a message and that's the text that we sent so that seems to be working we can see it in a tabular format and also in the raw json format that came back from slack api so in this case the node's set up and working correctly if we close it now we could execute the entire workflow which in this case is the same as clicking this execute node workflow since we've really only got one node after the start mode but we see that okay it fired again um so that's the basics of setting up a node and connecting to a trigger in the next tutorial we're going to add a github trigger and use expressions to reference data that we pull in from github to post a dynamic message in slack