Automate the busywork.Own the workflows and data.

Self-hosted n8n without a server to look after.

n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool: you connect a trigger, such as a webhook, a form or a schedule, to steps that call other services, transform data and branch on the result. Fortly installs n8n 2.44 into a new project with no setup questions at all. It generates the key n8n uses to encrypt the credentials you save and starts n8n at its own address in a few seconds.

1. Open Apps in the console and choose n8n. There are no fields to fill in.
2. Deploy. Fortly waits until n8n reports itself ready before sending the first visitor in.
3. Open the address straight away and create the owner account. n8n gives that account to whoever opens it first.

On the Workers runtime, with its own data.

n8n runs on Fortly’s Workers runtime, with no Node.js server behind it: its engine, its editor and a sandbox for the Code node all run in one lightweight process for the project, which starts in about three seconds after a quiet spell. Workflows, execution history and saved credentials live in n8n’s own database and object store in the project’s data directory, kept across restarts and redeploys.

Each time n8n starts, Fortly saves a compressed copy of that data to the project’s own storage, and a project that ever starts without its data, on a new node, is restored from it before n8n opens.

Credentials are encrypted with N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY, a secret generated for this project alone. You can see its name on the project’s Environment view, never its value. Keep it: n8n cannot read credentials saved under a different key, so changing it would mean entering every credential again.

Run scheduled workflows on time.

n8n’s Schedule trigger fires on time while n8n is running. Like every project with its own process on Fortly, it stops after fifteen minutes without a request and starts again on the next one. That keeps an idle editor free, but its interval and cron triggers do not fire while it is stopped.

For a workflow that must run on a timetable, start it with an n8n Webhook trigger and add a Fortly schedule that requests the webhook’s path. A schedule’s request wakes the project, so the workflow runs whether or not anybody has opened the editor that day. Schedules use five-field UTC cron expressions and keep a record of each run.

After it is live.

Give the editor and its webhooks a domain of your own on the Domains tab, so the URLs you paste into other services do not change later. Follow n8n’s output on Observability, and query its tables from the Database tab when you need to audit an execution. The project is yours to delete; doing so removes n8n, its database and every saved credential.