Automated daily workflow backup to GitHub

This workflow provides a robust solution for automatically backing up all your n8n workflows to a designated GitHub repository on a daily basis. By leveraging the n8n API and GitHub API, it ensures your workflows are version-controlled and securely stored, safeguarding against data loss and facilitating disaster recovery.

How it works

The automation follows these key steps:

1. Scheduled trigger: The workflow is initiated automatically every day at a pre-configured time. 2. List existing backups: It first connects to your GitHub repository to retrieve a list of already backed-up workflow files. This helps in determining whether a workflow's backup file needs to be created or updated. 3. Retrieve n8n workflows: The workflow then fetches all current workflows directly from your n8n instance using the n8n REST API. 4. Process and prepare: Each retrieved workflow is individually processed. Its data is converted into JSON format. This JSON content is then encoded to base64, a format suitable for GitHub API file operations. 5. Commit to GitHub: For each n8n workflow: A standardized filename is generated (e.g., workflow-name-tag.json). The workflow checks if a file with this name already exists in the GitHub repository (based on the list fetched in step 2). If the file exists: It updates the existing file with the latest version of the workflow. If it's a new workflow (file doesn't exist): A new file is created in the repository. Each commit is timestamped for clarity.

This process ensures that you always have an up-to-date version of all your n8n workflows stored securely in your GitHub version control system, providing peace of mind and a reliable backup history.

Pre-requisites

Before you can use this template, please ensure you have the following:

An active n8n instance (self-hosted or cloud). A GitHub account. A GitHub repository created where you want to store the workflow backups. A GitHub Personal Access Token with repo scope (or fine-grained token with read/write access to the specific backup repository). This token will be used for GitHub API authentication. n8n API credentials (API key) for your n8n instance.