The URL is the whole decision

Here is the mistake, and it is a common one. You are told to go and build something in n8n. You search for n8n login, you land on n8n.io, you sign up, you sign in, you start building. Halfway through you notice that none of your colleagues can see the workflow, and that the company's Slack and Google connections are nowhere to be found. You were never on the company system at all.

WoowTech runs its own n8n, installed on the company's own server, at https://n8n.woowtech.io/. Three things follow from that, and this part settles each of them in turn:

• The URL. Where you actually press Enter.
• The account. How you get one from IT, and what it looks like when it arrives.
• The first sign-in. What you will see, and what it means when something you expected is missing.

Before any of that, a few words you will need when you talk to IT. Getting these straight is what stops a support request turning into three rounds of clarification.

Accounts do not carry over between the two, and neither side can see the other's workflows. Your work exists in this one instance. Change the URL and it is gone.

flowchart LR
  subgraph Q["Not the one you want for work"]
    direction LR
    F["Your browser"] --> G["n8n.io
the vendor's
cloud edition"]
    G --> H["An account you
registered
yourself"]
    H --> I["Only you can
see the work.
No company
credentials"]
  end
  subgraph P["The company instance"]
    direction LR
    A["Your browser"] --> B["Cloudflare Proxy,
then the
company network"]
    B --> D["n8n.woowtech.io
self-hosted"]
    D --> E["The account IT
made for you"]
  end

If you have not read Part 1 of this series, skim it first. It defines Workflow, Execution and Credential, and those three words are about to start appearing in every paragraph.

You do not register yourself

There is no sign-up button waiting for you. An account on the company instance is created for you by IT or an admin, inside the system. Your part is to ask, and then to know what shape the answer will arrive in.

The answer arrives by hand, and there is a specific reason for that. This instance has no mail server configured — a check of https://n8n.woowtech.io/rest/settings returns smtpSetup: false — so the official invitation email n8n would normally send simply never leaves the building. Instead, IT hands you one of two things over Slack or in person: an invite link (an Invite URL), or a temporary password.

There is no rule about the email domain — n8n does not enforce one. The WoowTech convention is your name at the company domain, so [email protected] in shape, but IT may use something else. Use whatever they actually give you.

Now the sign-in itself. Have a browser open — Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox all work — and the temporary password from IT within reach.

1. Step 1

   Paste the address and press Enter

   Put this into the address bar:

   https://n8n.woowtech.io/

   It has to be https, not http. If you type only n8n.woowtech.io, the browser will usually fill in the https:// for you, and that is normal.

2. Step 2

   Recognize the sign-in screen

   The background is light gray — this build has no dark-theme option turned on for the sign-in page — with a white card in the middle. The top of the card carries n8n's pink and orange-red connected-node logo and the lowercase word n8n. Below that sit two fields, Email and Password, an orange Sign in button, and one small link underneath it: Forgot my password. Note the exact wording — it is not “Forgot password?”.

   There is no Sign in with SSO button and no one-click Google button, because SSO is not enabled here. Seeing this card means you reached the right place.

3. Step 3

   Enter what IT gave you, exactly

   Copy and paste rather than typing by hand. A temporary password will usually mix upper and lower case with special characters, and one mistyped character looks identical to a wrong password.

   If IT gave you an Invite URL instead of a password, you are on a different path. It has this shape:

   https://n8n.woowtech.io/signup?inviterId=…&inviteeId=…

   Open that address, set your own password and name on the page that comes up, and you are signed in automatically when you finish. In that case, skip to step 5.

   Say no to “Save this password?” for now. On your own computer the browser will offer to remember it. Decline while the password is still the temporary one — you are about to change it, and a saved credential you have already replaced is a small trap you set for yourself. Save the new one once it is the real one.
4. Step 4

   Press Sign in, then change the temporary password yourself

   The Community edition does not force a password change on first sign-in. Nothing will prompt you, so it is on you to do it: open your avatar, then Settings → Personal → Change password.

   The minimum length is 8 characters — the same settings check returns passwordMinLength: 8 — and mixing letters, numbers and symbols is a good idea.

5. Step 5

   Land on the home page

   You arrive at /home/workflows. The screen splits into three parts: a narrow sidebar down the left, the main area in the middle — usually an empty Workflows list the first time, or a Get started card — and your avatar, showing your initials, at the bottom of the sidebar.

   That last detail is the single most missed thing on this screen: the avatar is at the bottom of the left sidebar, not in the top-right corner where most web apps put it.

The screen changed. That is not the same as being in the right place.

With sign-in, “something happened” is surface success. What you actually want to confirm is that you reached your own workspace, with the access you are supposed to have. Five quick looks settle it.

That last one is not really a failure. A list full of other people's work usually means you were added to a shared workspace. An empty list is equally normal — nobody has put anything there yet.

“I cannot see that feature”

The most common confusion after a first sign-in sounds like this: a colleague said to click Credentials on the left, and you do not have that item. Almost always, n8n is working fine. What differs is your permissions, your workspace, or which edition of n8n this is.

Which devices you can actually work on

n8n is a pure web app with nothing to install, so in theory any device with a browser opens it. In practice, opens and is workable on are two different claims.

One more thing about sessions, and it catches people out: a single browser holds one n8n account at a time. If you need two at once — your own plus a test account, say — use an incognito window or install a second browser, one Chrome and one Firefox. Two ordinary tabs in the same window will sign each other out.

Seven stops down the left

Most people freeze for about three seconds on their first sign-in: unfamiliar names down the side, a blank canvas in the middle, a huddle of small icons in one corner. The rest of this part is a tour. Nothing here changes anything on your instance — you are moving the mouse over each area once and reading what it is for.

The one real difference between n8n and tools like Zapier or Make is that n8n shows you everything: every workflow, every past run and every stored key sit in the same interface. That is a genuine advantage later and a lot to look at on day one. The dark strip on the far left is the main sidebar, and it goes top to bottom like this.

Notice what is not in that list: Settings. It is not a sidebar item of its own. You reach it through the avatar at the bottom, which is the other half of why that corner is worth remembering.

So there are really only two controls you need on day one, and they are at opposite ends of the same strip:

Six places on one screen

From the sidebar, click Workflows and open any workflow. If you have none yet, click + Create Workflow in the top-right corner and start an empty one. Either way you land in the workflow editor, and the screen divides into six areas.

Draft and published are two different states

From n8n 2.0 onward, the old Active toggle is gone, replaced by a Publish and Unpublish model. What you edit is always a draft. Only pressing Publish pushes the current version live, at which point the schedule, the Webhook and message events start arriving. Until then, the only thing that can run the workflow is the manual Execute Workflow button.

Woow n8n already runs n8n 2.x, so what you will find in the top-right corner is Publish, not an Active toggle. The change exists so that nobody switches a half-edited workflow on by accident.

stateDiagram-v2
  direction LR
  [*] --> Draft
  Draft --> Published: Publish
  Published --> Draft: Unpublish

What a node is made of

Every node is a rectangular card on the canvas, and every card has the same four parts.

• The dot on the left, the input. Data flows in here. Trigger nodes have no input dot, because they are the head of the workflow — nothing comes before them.
• The node icon. Slack's hash, Gmail's envelope, and so on, so you recognize the service at a glance.
• The node name. By default it is the node type, for example Schedule Trigger. Double-click it and rename it to something you will understand in six months, such as Every day at 8 am.
• The dot on the right, the output. Data flows out here. Some nodes have more than one: the IF node has two, true and false.

A connection is the curve between two nodes. You drag from the previous node's output dot to the next node's input dot — that direction, and not the other one. Hover over an existing connection and an × appears so you can delete it.

flowchart LR
  A["Schedule Trigger
a Trigger has no input dot"] --> B["Slack
input dot left, output dot right"]
  B --> C{"IF
two outputs"}
  C -->|"true"| D["Google Sheets"]
  C -->|"false"| E["HTTP Request"]

Click any node and a settings panel slides out from the right. It usually carries three tabs.

The nodes panel

There are four ways to open it, and they all slide the same panel in from the right: right-click empty canvas, press Tab, click the + between two nodes, or click + Add first step in the middle of an empty workflow. It is the only way to add a node.

A search box sits at the top, and typing the service name — slack, gmail, sheet — is by far the fastest route. Below it, the list opens into two top-level groups.

Below those, nodes are grouped again by purpose — Communication, Data & Storage, Marketing, Development, AI and more. If you cannot find something, search for it rather than browsing: n8n ships several hundred nodes, and most of them are found by name. Part 5 takes the node families apart in full.

The four buttons in the bottom-right corner

Plenty of people go a whole year without touching these, and every one of them earns its place.

Executions, Credentials, Templates

Three pages carry most of the daily weight once you are actually building. Two of them are in the sidebar, one of them is in two places, and the first is the one that will save you the most time.

Executions, the page that rescues you

There are two ways in, and they show different scopes. Executions in the main sidebar lists every execution record for every workflow in the workspace, filterable by workflow. The Executions tab at the top of an open workflow lists only that workflow's runs.

Each record is a complete snapshot of one run, and it holds five things.

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Running
  Running --> Waiting: hits a Wait node
  Waiting --> Running
  Running --> Success
  Running --> Error
  Success --> [*]
  Error --> [*]

The trick worth learning now: when a workflow dies overnight, come here first rather than opening the workflow and staring at it. Open the red record and n8n marks the node that died with a red border, and the Output tab in the right-hand panel holds the full error message. Part 12 comes back to this page and turns it into a method.

Credentials, and why sharing one is a real decision

Click Credentials in the sidebar and you get every credential you have access to in this workspace: Slack Bot Token, Google OAuth, Gmail, OpenAI API Key, HTTP Header Auth and so on. Each row shows four things — the name you chose for it, such as Slack - #general notifications; the type, such as Slack API or Google Sheets OAuth2; the owner and who it is shared with; and when it was created and last edited.

One design detail explains several later surprises: credentials and workflows are stored separately. Deleting a workflow does not delete the credential it used. Delete a credential and every workflow that used it shows a red warning on that node. That separation is deliberate, because one credential is meant to be shared by many workflows.

Templates, from two entry points

Both routes land in the same gallery: Templates in the main sidebar, or the button in the top-right corner of the Workflows page — some versions label that one Browse templates. Once you are in, there are three things to do, none of them urgent today.

How to pick a good template, how to see which credentials one needs, and which fields to change once you have pasted it in: Part 3 walks through all of it, step by step.

Five ways to get stuck signing in, and five on the canvas

Signing in looks simple, and company environments vary enough that there are still plenty of ways to end up staring at a page that will not move. The first job is always to work out which layer you are stuck on before you start asking for help.

flowchart TD
  A["You cannot get in,
or something
is missing"] --> B{"Does the sign-in
card appear
at all?"}
  B -->|"no, blank
or spinning"| C["Force reload,
then a second browser,
then a device off
the company wifi"]
  B -->|"yes"| D{"What happens when
you press Sign in?"}
  D -->|"nothing
at all"| E["Disabled, never
activated, or the
wrong password.
Ask IT to check it"]
  D -->|"a red access
message"| F["The account exists
but was never added
to that project.
Ask the Owner"]
  D -->|"you reach the
home page"| G{"Is a menu item
a colleague
mentioned missing?"}
  G -->|"Insights, Variables,
Source Control,
Admin panel"| H["Enterprise or
Cloud Pro only.
Nothing to fix"]
  G -->|"a credential
you expected"| I["Ask its owner
to Share it,
or to move it to
a Team project"]

Now the five specific ones, in roughly the order they turn up.

• The login page spins forever, or goes white. Rule out your own side first, in this order: force a reload with Ctrl+Shift+R (Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac); try a different browser, Edge if Chrome failed; try a different device, a phone on mobile data and off the company wifi. Only when all three fail should you report to IT that n8n.woowtech.io is unreachable on every platform. At that point it is usually the server or Cloudflare, and saying so saves them twenty minutes.
• A red access message after signing in. Your account works; it was simply never added to a workspace or project. Do not keep retrying — the result will be identical. Screenshot the message, send it to IT or the workspace admin, and name the workspace you need. Once access is granted, refresh the page and you are in.
• You forgot your password. There is a Forgot my password link under the Sign in button. Click it, enter your email, and n8n tells you a reset email has been sent. On this build that email never goes out — the same smtpSetup: false from earlier, no mail server connected at all. The screen says sent; nothing will arrive. The only fix is to ask the Owner or IT to reset it by hand from the command line, something along the lines of n8n user-management:reset. Give them everything in one message.
• The layout breaks on a phone and you cannot tap the buttons. Try Chrome's Desktop site option from the top-right menu first. If that still fails, move to a computer. The canvas was never meant for small screens; that is a design limit rather than a bug. On a phone, treat n8n as a viewing tool.
• Two accounts keep kicking each other out. One browser, one session. Open an incognito window (Ctrl+Shift+N in Chrome), or install a second browser and keep the two apart. Two accounts in two ordinary tabs of the same window will overwrite each other every time.

And five on the canvas, which are the ones that turn up in your first hour of clicking around.

• The workflow opens completely blank. Normal — it is a brand-new, empty workflow. There is a + Add first step button in the middle. Click it, and the nodes panel appears showing Triggers only. Pick one and start.
• Nodes will not move, or settings will not change. Most likely you have Viewer permission rather than Editor, and a Read only notice will be sitting in the top-right corner of the page. Ask the workspace admin to raise your permission, or to share the workflow with you.
• The connection will not attach. You have to drag from the output dot, on the right of a node, to the input dot on the left of the next one. Do not let go part way. When you get close to the target dot it lights up green, and that is when you release. Dragging the other way round does not work, and that is deliberate.
• You cannot find the run you just made. Two places show it: the Executions tab at the top of the workflow, which shows this workflow only, or Executions in the sidebar, which shows everything. If you ran it by hand with Execute Workflow, the record is labeled Manual; if a Trigger fired it, the label is Trigger.
• You zoomed until you lost track of where you are. Press Fit view, the grid icon in the bottom-right corner, and the whole workflow scales back to fit the screen. It is the first thing to try when a node has gone missing, and more reliable than hunting for it.

Shortcuts worth memorizing

There is no built-in shortcut popup inside the app. Plenty of older tutorials say to press ?; on the current build that does nothing. The official docs keep a Keyboard shortcuts page instead, and searching for n8n keyboard shortcuts finds it. In practice these five carry you.

Questions people ask in week one

Where to go from here