n8n Community Edition Bootstrap

Quick and dirty setup of n8n Community Edition for evaluation and demonstration purposes.

Intended for evaluation purposes or simple testing from your cloud provider of choosing.

What This Deploys

• Ubuntu instance (AWS EC2, DigitalOcean Droplet, or GCP Compute Engine)
• Docker runtime
• n8n CE container running on port 5678
• n8n tunnel mode enabled for quick access

Prerequisites

• Terraform >= 1.13.0
• Either one of these:
  • AWS credentials configured
  • DigitalOcean Personal Access Token token
  • GCP authenticated

Quick Start

AWS

cd terraform/aws
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve

Use AWS Session Manager to connect to your EC2

DigitalOcean

cd terraform/do
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve -var="do_token=<your_do_token>"

Use Digital Ocean Console to connect to your Droplet

Google Cloud Platform

cd terraform/gcp
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve -var="project_id=<your_project_id>

Use gcloud to connect to your instance and check logs:

gcloud compute ssh n8n-server --zone=asia-southeast1-a --project=<your_project_id>

If you encounter organization policy errors regarding external IPs, reset the policy:

gcloud org-policies reset constraints/compute.vmExternalIpAccess --project=<your_project_id>

Setup Details

The deployment automatically:

1. Installs Docker on the instance
2. Pulls the n8n Docker image
3. Starts n8n with persistent volume storage
4. Configures n8n with tunnel mode for external access

Setup logs are available at /var/log/n8n-setup.log on the instance.

You can follow the setup log by running this:

tail -f /var/log/n8n-setup.log

And check the docker status with to get the tunnel url:

docker logs n8n

Notes

• This is not production-ready
• No SSL/TLS configuration included
• Uses n8n tunnel mode (not suitable for production)
• Default timezone set to Asia/Singapore

Cleanup

This cleanup all infrastructure resources

cd terraform/<your_cloud_provider>
terraform destroy -auto-approve