No "Unpublish" or "Deactivate" for workflows

[DavesAgenda]

Describe the problem/error/question

I wanted to temporarily deactivate a webhook triggered workflow, so I deativated the webhook node, saved, but then I was unable to publish it as it said "This workflow has no trigger nodes that require publishing". This meant that even though I'd deactivated the node, because I couldn't republish the workflow it kept receiving payloads.I had to deactivate the rest of the workflow and publish that.

What is the error message (if any)?

"This workflow has no trigger nodes that require publishing" - that was the point, I wanted to "unpublish it" but I could not.

Please share your workflow/screenshots/recording

Share the output returned by the last node

Debug info

core

• n8nVersion: 2.0.0
• platform: docker (self-hosted)
• nodeJsVersion: 22.21.0
• nodeEnv: production
• database: sqlite
• executionMode: regular
• concurrency: -1
• license: enterprise (production)

storage

• success: all
• error: all
• progress: false
• manual: true
• binaryMode: filesystem

pruning

• enabled: true
• maxAge: 336 hours
• maxCount: 10000 executions

client

• userAgent: mozilla/5.0 (macintosh; intel mac os x 10_15_7) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/143.0.0.0 safari/537.36
• isTouchDevice: false

Generated at: 2025-12-15T05:36:43.602Z}

[MookieLian]

Thanks for bringing this up! After reviewing the details, it seems like the behaviour you've reported is actually expected and not a bug. We can understand how this might seem confusing, so we've added a note to clarify things.

If you have any questions or need more details, feel free to reach out again, we're here to help!

Note that you can not publish a workflow that doesn't contain a production trigger. However you can ¨Unpublish¨ a workflow from the dropdown menu, as shown in this image:

#closed:working-as-expected

[n8n-assistant]

Thank you for taking the time to share your suggestion! We’ve reviewed the details, and it seems this is more of a feature or enhancement request rather than a bug report.

As a heads-up, we use GitHub issues exclusively for tracking bugs. For feature requests or support questions, we recommend sharing them on our forum, where the community and our team actively discuss and prioritize new ideas.

We’re closing this issue for now to keep our tracker focused, but we’d love to hear more about your idea on the forum! Your feedback helps us improve, and we truly appreciate it.

Thanks again for contributing, and we hope to see you on the forum!