n8n

What This Skill Does

The n8n skill for OpenClaw provides a powerful interface for interacting with your n8n automation platform via its REST API. This skill allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of your workflows, from simple activation and deactivation to triggering manual executions and debugging complex automation errors. It acts as a bridge between your AI agent and your automation infrastructure, enabling you to inspect execution logs, manage active statuses, and dynamically run workflows with custom data payloads, effectively turning your OpenClaw agent into an automated workflow orchestrator.

Installation

To get started, first set up the virtual environment by navigating to the skill directory: cd skills/n8n-1.0.2, creating a venv, and running pip install -r requirements.txt. Once dependencies are installed, you must configure your credentials. Open your shell configuration file (e.g., ~/.zshrc) and add the environment variables N8N_API_KEY and N8N_BASE_URL. After sourcing your configuration, run the verification command ./skills/n8n-1.0.2/scripts/n8n.sh list-workflows --pretty to confirm the agent can communicate with your instance. The skill is installed via the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/pntrivedy/n8n-1-0-2.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for DevOps engineers and automation specialists. Common use cases include monitoring the health of business-critical workflows, debugging failed automation tasks by reviewing execution logs directly through the CLI, and batch-managing the activation status of workflows during system migrations or deployments. It also allows developers to trigger complex data-processing pipelines by passing JSON payloads from the agent directly to n8n triggers.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, list all active workflows in my n8n instance and show me the status of the last 5 executions."
2. "I noticed my customer-onboarding workflow failed. Can you retrieve the error details for the most recent failed execution?"
3. "Trigger the lead-processing workflow and pass this JSON data: {'email': '[email protected]', 'source': 'webform'}."

Tips & Limitations

Always use the --pretty flag for terminal queries to ensure readable output. When passing data, ensure your JSON strings are properly escaped to prevent parsing errors. Note that this skill requires direct network access to your n8n instance; if you are behind a strict firewall or using a local instance, ensure your N8N_BASE_URL is reachable from the machine running OpenClaw. For advanced debugging, always check the execution history using the list-executions command to identify patterns in failure events.