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Are you finding it challenging to learn how to use
n8n? In this video you'll learn all the essentials
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to get rolling. We'll familiarize ourselves with
n8n's interface and get our feet wet with learning
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how to send customized messages to a list of
customers. Let's get started. In my last video,
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we learned three ways to self-host n8n, including
the highly performant and production-grade Queue
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Mode version of n8n, which we installed on a
server with a few simple clicks. If you haven't
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seen that video yet, check it out up here. If
you've self-hosted n8n by following the steps in
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that video, you should see a setup owner account
signup page. Go ahead and register your admin
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account there. You can see that they have a bit
of a questionnaire for you and you can fill that
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out. And once you've done that, this should take
you to the main n8n interface. There are a bunch
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of options on the left sidebar. At the top we have
templates and we'll get back to these in a minute.
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There's variables, but this is only available
on the enterprise plan as well as cloud hosted
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services, so we won't be looking at these. There's
all executions, which is a log of your workflows
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and whether they were successful or not. There's a
help section, which includes the n8n documentation
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as well as a forum. And you may or may not
have an update message that indicates whether
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a new version of n8n is available to you or not. I
showed you how to update n8n using three different
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methods, which you can watch here. Now at the
bottom, if you click on these three dots here,
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you can access the settings. Most of these
settings you can leave as is, and a lot of
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them only are available on the enterprise plan.
But on the personal link here down at the bottom,
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you can set light or dark mode on n8n. Now
just going back to the main window again,
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this area will list all the workflows that
you've created. You can add a new workflow
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by clicking this start from scratch button.
Or once you've added a workflow, there will be
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an orange button here that says add workflow.
n8n consists of workflows. This is equivalent
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to Zapier's Zaps and Make.com Scenarios. In the
main window, this is where all your workflows are
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listed. But in this video, we're going to start by
using a template instead. So on the left sidebar,
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you click on templates, and that'll take you to
a page of pre-built templates provided by n8n
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and the community. n8n provides template workflows
you can use to get up and started quickly based on
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what you need. For starters, let's use a Quick
Start template. So if I click in this search
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box and I just type Quick Start, there will be one
result that says very quick Quick Start. And let's
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click on that. So once it loads, we can click
here to explore and it'll actually show you the
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different nodes that are in this Quick Start.
Let's click use workflow. And there are a few
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options here that we can choose. The first one
is usually the one you want, which is to import
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the template into your self hosted instance. But
as an alternative, you can copy the template to
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your clipboard in JSON format and then paste that
into a text file and save it as a JSON file and
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then import it into n8n manually. But I'm going to
use import template into my self hosted instance.
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And there you go. It's imported. Now, workflows
generally go from left to right, both in this
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workflow canvas view, as well as when you double
click into each of these nodes and there's a node
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detail view. There's a few buttons down at the
bottom here which allow you to navigate around in
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this workflow canvas view. This left button zooms
to fit everything into your canvas space. This one
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zooms in, this one zooms out and this one resets
your zoom. You can also click down anywhere on
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this canvas. And while holding your mouse button
down, you can select as many things as you want
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by dragging a rectangle around it. If you hold the
spacebar down, you can see that your pointer turns
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into a hand and then while holding the spacebar
down, you can actually drag around your canvas
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and move it around this way. If I double click
on this first node here from left to right,
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it shows the inputs that will come into this node
on the left here. Then in the middle, it shows the
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details of this particular node. And then on the
right hand side, it will show the outputs that
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come out of this node once it's processed. This is
a common pattern that will repeat for every single
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node that you encounter. This particular node
doesn't have a lot of options to it. There's just
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get one person or get all people. This is simply
a demo node created by n8n so we don't really need
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to worry about where it's getting the data from.
All we need to know is that it's getting a list
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of customer data. So if I click the test step
button, it will run this node and on the right
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side we can see its output, which is it's grabbed
five records of customer data here. At the top we
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can see the different views to display this data.
By default it displays this in a table format, but
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we can also see it in JSON format as well as the
schema. Now although it's in different formats,
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the data remains the same. There is this pin
button at the top right, which is really helpful
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when you want the data to remain static so it
doesn't continually query this every single time
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you run a test. I can click this on for now and it
says this data is pinned. Now if I close this node
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and I go back to the canvas, if I look at this
second node, it says here extract data and prepare
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it for use in the next node. Now if I double
click on this node, we can see the input that's
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coming into this node, which is the customer
data from the previous node. If you recall,
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the output from the last node contained the data
of five customers. And even though this input is
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only showing the first customer's data, we can see
that it says five items in the input. So what this
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node is doing is that even though in the previous
node it grabbed a whole bunch of data with a whole
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bunch of information, we want to extract the
three things that we're really interested in,
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which is the customer ID, the customer name and
the customer description. So just to show you
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how this was created, I can delete these three
fields here and I can add the new ones. So the
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first one I would call customer ID, leave it as
a string and I can drag this ID that's provided
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in the data from the previous node and drag it
into that field there. Same with customer name,
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and I'll drag the customer's name over here.
And you can see that it gives me an example
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of what would show up here. And in this case, it's
JGatsby, which is the name that it pulled from the
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previous node. And then lastly, I will create one
more and this will be customer description. And
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I'll drag in the notes into this field here. And
this is how we extract data in n8n to a particular
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number of fields that we're interested in. If
we click test step in this node, you can see
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that it iterated five times through the data that
was available. And it extracted the three fields
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that we were interested in, which is the customer
ID, customer name and the customer description,
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and then created a new list of data based on what
we had described in this node here. So one key
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concept I want to emphasize with n8n is that it'll
automatically loop through or iterate through the
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data that's available when it's stored as a list
or an array. We don't have to manually create a
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loop or some iteration flow in our workflows
in order for it to go through all the items. It
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automatically does that for us. Now I just wanted
to quickly pause to ask if you could help me out
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and hit the like button for this video. A simple
gesture like that would go a long way and I would
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really appreciate it. Go ahead and hit that like
button now. So going back to the workflow canvas,
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we can add a new node by clicking on this plus
button. We can go through this list and see what
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nodes are available to us. But for the purposes
of this video, I'm going to search for customer
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messenger. Let's add this as a new node to
our workflow. This simple node provided for
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n8n training allows us to simulate a personalized
or customized message that we can send to all our
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customers in our list. So in this new node, we can
see the input, which is the output that's from the
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previous node. And again, there's five items and
it's the three things that we had specified. We
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can also access the data from previous nodes down
below here. So you can see here, this was the data
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that we had retrieved from the data store from
the first node. But I'm going to use the data
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from the most recent node that we created. So I'm
going to grab the customer ID from the input here
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and drag it to the customer ID field here. And
you can see that it creates these curly braces
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and the text JSON customer ID. And down below it
shows a sample result, which in this case is this
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23423532, which is the ID of the first record
in the previous data. Another important thing
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to note is that there's two options up here. One
is fixed and the other is expression. Expression
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means that it's going to be interpreting
anything in double curly braces as a variable,
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and it's going to plug in something into those
double curly braces. The fixed option literally
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means it's going to be outputting the double curly
braces with JSON customer ID, which is not what
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we want here. So anytime we're trying to insert a
variable from the input data, we want to make sure
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that it's always set to expression. And that'll be
confirmed by showing you a sample result. Another
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dead giveaway is that it shows up in green. So in
the message, let's type out hi, and then we can
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drag in customer name. And again, it shows that
example. And it shows that it's an expression
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and it shows as green. So that's a confirmation
there. So I'm just going to get rid of that space.
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So hi customer name. And then we can say your
description is, and then we can drag the customer
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description in. And it'll show this example. So hi
Jay Gatsby, your description is keeps asking about
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a green light question mark. So that's exactly
what we want there. And I'll put a period at the
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end. Now you may have noticed that when I was
dragging the input fields into the node, n8n
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made some suggestions, many of which appear to be
JavaScript functions. This is because everything
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contained in the double curly braces is in fact
a JavaScript expression. There are two things to
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note here. One, evidently, n8n stores and passes
data between nodes as standard JSON objects, which
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are accessed using JSON notation. And two, since
it's using JavaScript within the double curly
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braces, you can use other JavaScript expressions
as well, such as inserting dates and times,
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transforming data, validating data, among other
things. Throughout this series, we'll go over
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accessing JSON objects and other n8n JavaScript
expressions in more detail. But for now,
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just know that having JavaScript baked into all
nodes opens up a world of powerful capabilities.
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I should mention that only JavaScript can go
into the double curly braces, and unfortunately,
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Python cannot be used. So again, note that
n8n is showing there are five items in this
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list or array, even though it's only showing
one result, the first result from that list of
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items. Let's click the test step button. And you
can see here, it says sent message to customer,
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and then that's the customer ID. And then there's
the message. Hi, Jay Gatsby, your description is
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keeps asking about a green light. So again, it
iterated through all five items, and it created
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the custom message for each one. So you know, this
one is your description is lots of people named
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him, very confusing, and so on and so forth. Now,
just a couple of other things I wanted to mention,
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if we go back to the workflow canvas here, make
sure to save your work by clicking on this button
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at the top right. Otherwise, you could lose all
the work that you've done. And the other thing is
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you can rename your workflow to whatever you want,
you simply double click this. And you can say this
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is my first workflow. And the other thing you can
do is you can add tags, it can be helpful to tag
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your workflows, because at least at the time of
this recording, n8n does not have the capability
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to group workflows into folders or directories.
So you can only filter things using tags. So I
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might want to tag this with like, tutorial, for
example. And so that adds that as a tag. And now
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when I go back to the main homepage, which lists
out all my workflows, right now I only have one.
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But if I do list out all my workflows, I can then
select filters here, and it'll say filter by tags,
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and I can actually choose the tutorial tag. And
that would just list out all the workflows that
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have been tagged with tutorial. Now the other
thing I can do is I can just search by keyword.
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So if I wanted to search for like, you know, first
workflow, it'll actually pull up anything with
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that keyword in it. Now we could continue building
out this workflow by sending these messages out to
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each customer via something like SMS or WhatsApp.
But that's outside of what I wanted to show you in
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this brief introduction to n8n. So we learned how
the n8n interface works. We learned that workflows
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generally get processed from left to right. The
nodes interface also runs from left to right,
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taking some input, processing it, and producing an
output. We learned that a node will automatically
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loop or iterate through any list or array
of items, and the results will be seen in
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the output. Lastly, the data passed between nodes
are JSON objects, and anything contained in double
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curly braces is a JavaScript expression. I hope
this helped to give you a solid introduction to
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how n8n works and gets you well on your way to
using n8n to make some crazy cool automations.
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Please remember to like this video and check out
my next one in this tutorial series to learn more
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intermediate concepts of n8n, including how to
use webhooks, querying a live API, and adding
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custom Python or JavaScript code. Thanks for
watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
