Hello and welcome to video number nine of the beginner course for n8n. In this video, we'll be covering collaboration, workflow sharing, credentials, and some other useful tips and tricks.

The first thing I'd like us to cover is the community, and this is really something that makes n8n stand out from other automation platforms.

Uh it's a very active and responsive community. The community is a great place to find announcements, information about upcoming features, or, for example, to request new features.

You can also ask questions about your workflows or report on bugs. Uh this is where you'll find all of the community events. Um what's great is the support usually answers very fast, preventing any downtime when it comes to building workflows.

Um feature requesting is a great way to bring more attention to a feature that you would like in n8n.

Um so don't hesitate to head over there and request features if there's something you're looking for.

You can find the community on community.n8n.io. Part of what the community helps build is a library of templates. So templates cover a very wide array of common automation problems that are being solved with n8n.

Do you want to build an API endpoint instead of starting from scratch? Start with, you know, this template by John.

If you want to back up all of your n8n workflows to a GitHub instance, same thing, you can just do this with uh a workflow that already exists.

Uh through these templates, this will save you a lot of time when building workflows and might even save you the whole time dedicated to building something specific that you can just find in the template library.

There are also workflows for building chat bots, extracting text from PDFs, as well as many, many more very interesting use cases.

You can find all of these and more on n8n.io/workflows or directly from the n8n interface.

Um, you can sort them by category, search by name, or by node type. Um, so if you want to build a workflow using Open AI, you can just type Open AI and sort of see what kind of templates are already available.

So always remember to check here before you start building your workflows. Also, if you build something interesting, or you build something that you think might be useful to other people, you can also submit it as a template for others to use.

Don't worry, no credentials are shared when submitting workflows, so you don't have to worry about any security issues when it comes to that.

Now let's talk about the different kinds of access and users that are available in n8n, um, when it comes to users, workflows, and credentials.

And let's start off with, uh, user management.

There are three types or three levels of users: owner, admin, and member. These users will have different access levels when it comes to workflows and credentials, and this is made to ensure that no one has unwanted access to specific workflows, API keys, or access to any specific tools.

The owner is—there's only one owner per n8n instance, and they have all of the rights listed here below.

I won't read through all of them. What's important to note is that even though they have access to all the workflows and credentials, they won't be able to read the sensitive information.

So if you get an API key from Slack, for example, and you create a credential, the owner will have access to the credential to share it or revoke ownership, but will not be able to extract the, uh, the API key or app token from the credential.

So it's access to sharing, but not access to the underlying potentially sensitive information. Then underneath owners, we have admins.

Admins are much like owners, except they don't have access to the n8n cloud dashboard or, uh, can't manage anything when it comes to the owner role. So, modifying or changing the owner role, members are just your standard normal n8n users, and they can manage their own accounts and workflows.

Whether that be tags, uh, assigning workflows, sharing workflows, or their own settings such as passwords. When building workflows, you will have the option to share or restrict access, uh, to the workflow to different members of the team.

It is recommended that only the relevant users have access to the relevant workflows to avoid unwanted changes being made or bugs being introduced by people who might not understand the workflow at hand.

Workflow sharing is the method used to, well, share or give access to workflows between users of the same n8n instance.

Users can share workflows that they created, and instance owners or admins can view and share all workflows in the instance.

Uh, by default, a member that does not have a workflow shared with them will not be able to access that workflow.

So if you are going to be collaborating with other members on a workflow, remember to go in and share the sharing option can be accessed at the top right of the workflows canvas.

Um, you have from the main workflow menu, you can see all of the workflows that you have access to, as well as a filter for workflows created by you, uh, of which you have sharing rights.

There are two workflow roles: Creator and editor. Um, below you can see the, uh, different roles that creators and editors have on the workflow. The Creator is a user who created the workflow, and editors are just other users that have access to the given workflow.

Workflow sharing allows editors to use all of the credentials that are used in a given workflow.

This includes credentials that aren't explicitly shared with them using credential sharing. This means if I create a workflow that has, for example, a Slack credential, and I share it to someone else that I'm working on.

This will also share the Slack credential with that person, even if they didn't have before access to that Slack credential.

This is simply so the person that is being shared the workflow with can jump into the workflow, make changes, test.

Uh, if needed, the last topic, uh, and this is an important one, especially when it comes to security, is credential sharing.

Credential sharing allows you to, well, share credentials, uh, that you've created with other users in the same n8n instance as you. The other users can then use the credentials in their workflows, but they won't be able to access or edit the credential details.

Just as we mentioned earlier, this is very important to ensure security, meaning that no one can extract the app token or API key from the credentials and use it somewhere else, uh, where they might not be authorized to.

Users can share credentials that they have created, and instance owners and users with the admin role can view and share all credentials in the instance again without access accessing the underlying data.

From the left menu, when you open a credential, um, you will be able to add new users under the sharing settings. Uh, this is where you can invite new users as well as revoke access, uh, should you want to prevent someone from having access to a specific credential.

One last topic, uh, we're going to cover in this video is the n8n API. Uh, now this may seem a little bit funny, uh, we're using APIs in n8n.

Why does n8n have its own API? Um, this allows for, you know, two main use cases. Uh, the first one is to use the uh, n8n node to manage other n8n workflows.

We'll dive a little, we'll dive deeper into that in just a second and The second use case is to access, create, edit n8n workflows from external programs.

So to use the n8n API, head over to the settings and then the n8n API section in the settings.

And from here, you can generate a new API key. This API key uh is used to authenticate to the n8n API as you would pretty much any other API.

It's a REST API and from here you have end points to retrieve execution logs, delete execution logs, create, update, delete as well as activate or deactivate workflows and you can also create and delete credentials among many other features.

The second method is by using the n8n node, which has pretty much all of the same features as the API. The most useful use case for this will be updating workflows programmatically.

So for example, activating or deactivating workflows depending on certain conditions.

Uh, we could imagine that we have a workflow that we only want to run on working hours, so let's say 8:00 a.

m. to 6:00 p.m. We could use a supporting workflow to deactivate the workflow at 6:00 p.m. and reactivate it at 8:00 a.

m. Uh, this could also be done in the workflow itself, but here we could do it using the API. There's also a generate security audit feature, uh, which can come in handy for getting all of the execution logs and anything you might need uh for a security audit.

Thanks for listening to video number nine of the beginner course where we covered workflow sharing credentials and many other useful tips and tricks.

n8n Beginner Course (9/9) - Collaboration

n8n Beginner Course (9/9) - Collaboration