I wrote this as part of a reply in another thread but figured that others could benefit from it and wouldn’t need to stumble on it.
You can think of n8n as a free alternative to something like Zapier, it allows you to create custom server side workflows with no code, using a similar visual node paradigm to Appgyver composer, in addition to Webhook workflow triggers (what we would likely use from Appgyver apps), you can trigger a workflow from many other things say an inbound SMS message from Twilio or a triggering message from Discord, Slack or mattermost for example.
You could probably get away with using it to run the entire backend of your Appgyver app on a cheap digitalocean server ($5/m) if you also installed a local database supported. by n8n (ie: Mysql, Postgres, MongoDB, CrateDB, etc)
I finally got around to messing around with n8n last night, it was so easy to get going locally, I was blown away!
Once you have node.js setup all you need to do is:
npm install n8n -g
to install it, then:
n8n start --tunnel
which sets up a tunnel and provides you with a publicly accessible URL to your local instance so that you can handle the callbacks when you do the OAuth authentication that many/most modern services require.
In about 15 minutes I was able to set up a workflow with a webhook trigger (and was also given a public URL for that) and connected it to a node to read from a selected sheet and return the result – for bonus points I also setup another workflow to read from a firebase collection and return the results.
From Appgyver you would just need an http request to the webhook URL passing whatever you need to the webhook and it would return the results from the last node of whatever workflow you triggered with your request.
It’s ridiculous how many services it supports!!!
Does anyone have any more experience with this they can share? I’m eager to learn more about it, and limitations, performance, etc.
