n8n

What This Skill Does

The n8n skill for OpenClaw provides a powerful interface for interacting with your n8n automation instances via the REST API. This tool allows users to manage, monitor, and debug their workflows directly from the terminal or through natural language commands within the OpenClaw environment. By abstracting the complexities of HTTP requests into simple CLI commands or Python functions, this skill enables seamless automation management, including listing active workflows, toggling workflow states, triggering manual executions with custom payloads, and inspecting execution logs to identify points of failure. Whether you are scaling your automation architecture or performing routine maintenance on existing pipelines, this skill ensures full control over your n8n instance.

Installation

To begin, ensure you have the openclawcli tool installed as per the instructions at openclawcli.forum. Next, install the skill package using the command clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/thiagoruss0/n8nsk. After installation, you must configure your authentication by setting the N8N_API_KEY environment variable. You can verify your connection by running python3 scripts/n8n_api.py list-workflows --pretty. For persistent configuration, it is highly recommended to add the export command to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc shell profile to prevent re-authentication requirements between sessions.

Use Cases

This skill is designed for DevOps engineers and automation specialists who need to manage complex n8n ecosystems. Common use cases include:

• Automated monitoring: Regularly checking for workflow execution failures.
• CI/CD pipelines: Triggering workflows automatically after specific code deployments or data updates.
• Batch processing: Triggering multiple workflows with specific JSON payloads for data ingestion tasks.
• Disaster recovery: Quickly deactivating faulty or high-load workflows during service incidents.

Example Prompts

1. "List all active workflows in my n8n instance and show me the status of the last 5 executions."
2. "Trigger the workflow with ID 102 and pass the JSON payload containing the customer update data."
3. "Find the most recent execution for workflow 45 and tell me if it failed or succeeded."

Tips & Limitations

Always ensure that your N8N_API_KEY has the minimum required permissions to perform the tasks you intend to automate. When triggering workflows with custom data, ensure the payload is strictly valid JSON format to prevent API errors. For debugging, always leverage the --pretty flag to output human-readable data from execution logs. Note that large-scale bulk operations should be monitored closely to avoid hitting API rate limits on your n8n server, especially if the instance is hosted on a cloud plan with restricted throughput.