Configuration#
You can change n8n's settings using environment variables. For a full list of available configurations see Environment Variables.
Set environment variables by command line#
npm#
For npm, set your desired environment variables in terminal using the export
command as shown below:
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Docker#
In Docker you can use the -e
flag from the command line:
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Set environment variables using a file#
You can also configure n8n using a configuration file.
Only define the values that need to be different from the default in your configuration file. You can use multiple files. For example, you can have a file with generic base settings, and files with specific values for different environments.
npm#
Set the path to the JSON configuration file using the environment variable N8N_CONFIG_FILES
:
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Example file:
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Formatting as JSON
You can't always work out the correct JSON from the Environment variables reference. For example, to set N8N_METRICS
to true
, you need to do:
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Refer to the Schema file in the source code for full details of the expected settings.
Docker#
In Docker, you can set your environment variables in the n8n: environment:
element of your docker-compose.yaml
file.
For example:
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Keeping sensitive data in separate files#
You can append _FILE
to some individual environment variables to provide their configuration in a separate file, enabling you to avoid passing sensitive details using environment variables. n8n loads the data from the file with the given name, making it possible to load data from Docker-Secrets and Kubernetes-Secrets.
The following environment variables support file input:
CREDENTIALS_OVERWRITE_DATA_FILE
DB_TYPE_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_DATABASE_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_HOST_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_PASSWORD_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_PORT_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_SSL_CA_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_SSL_CERT_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_SSL_KEY_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_SSL_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_USER_FILE
DB_POSTGRESDB_SCHEMA_FILE