Skip to content

Saving and publishing workflows#

n8n automatically saves your workflow changes every 5 seconds while you're editing. When you're ready to put the workflow into production, publish your workflow. This approach prevents accidental production changes while enabling safe iteration and review.

How saving works#

Changes save automatically every 5 seconds while you edit. No manual save button is required, though you can still use Ctrl+S or Cmd+S if preferred. All edits remain in draft until you publish.

How publishing works#

Publishing makes your workflow live and locks it to a specific version. Production executions will use this published version, not your latest edits. When you publish, your workflow will enable the following:

  • Webhook and form triggers will use their production URLs
  • Schedules will run at the times you've defined
  • Events from connected apps will trigger this workflow

Initial state: You open the workflow

Initial state when workflow is opened

Changed state: Autosaved changes yet to be published

Changes awaiting publish

Published state: All changes published

All changes published

Changed state: New changes yet to be published

New changes awaiting publish

How collaboration works#

Only one person can edit a workflow at a time. If someone else is currently editing:

  • You see the workflow in read-only mode
  • The edit lock releases when they stop editing or become inactive
  • You can then take over editing with the latest changes

Checking publishing status#

On the Workflows page, each workflow displays an indicator showing whether it is Published or Not Published. You will also be able to see the same indicator on the canvas header.

Publishing a workflow#

The Publish button in the canvas header is enabled whenever there are unpublished changes.

Each time you make a change to a workflow, n8n autosaves those changes to a new version of the workflow. These saved versions go live in production only when you publish the workflow after the changes.

  1. Click the Publish button to open the publishing modal
  2. The version name defaults to a UUID. Customize the name if you'd like and add a description of the version.
  3. Click Publish to make your changes live in production. Production executions always point to the currently published version.

If you only update workflow settings, n8n will re-publish the version without requiring you to take any action.

Managing version history#

View and manage version history by clicking the history icon in the header. In the version history view, you can perform these actions:

  • Unpublish the workflow to remove it from production
  • Restore a previous version. Restoring lets you work on a version without affecting the production execution.
  • Publish another version of the workflow

Unpublishing a Workflow#

Unpublish a workflow from either:

  • The workflow settings menu
  • The version history page (unpublish action on published versions)
This page was