Deploy n8n locally and start automating your jobs

n8n is a fair-code workflow automation tool: you connect apps and services into visual workflows of "nodes", and it runs them for you. Because it is source-available and self-hostable, you can run the whole thing on your own machine — your data never leaves it. Here's how to get from zero to a working automation.

1 — Run it locally

The fastest way to try n8n is npx (needs Node.js). For something persistent, Docker is the cleaner choice — it keeps your workflows and credentials in a mounted volume that survives restarts.

# Quick try (foreground), then open http://localhost:5678
npx n8n

# Persistent, with Docker (data kept in a named volume)
docker volume create n8n_data
docker run -it --rm \
  --name n8n -p 5678:5678 \
  -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n \
  docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

2 — Build your first workflow

Every workflow starts with a trigger and ends in one or more actions. Open the editor at localhost:5678 and add nodes:

1. Add a trigger — a schedule, a webhook, or "new row" in a database.
2. Add action nodes — call an API, send an email, update a sheet.
3. Use IF / Switch nodes to branch on conditions.
4. Run it once to test, check the data passed between nodes, then activate it.

3 — A starter idea

A great first automation: every morning, fetch new rows from a form or spreadsheet, format them, and post a summary to Slack or email. It's small, useful, and teaches the whole loop — trigger, transform, action — that every bigger workflow is built from.