Exercises 12 · Self-hosting and Client Delivery

Exercise 1: Alert only on state changes

Task: Wire Send Alert to Telegram/Slack/email, but alert only when a site goes down or comes back, not every 5 minutes while it stays down.

Done when: stopping a test site gives one "DOWN" alert, and starting it again gives one "RECOVERED" alert.

Hint

Remember the last state between executions with $getWorkflowStaticData('global') in a Code node (it persists for production executions).

Exercise 2: Restore drill

Task: Restore a backup archive into a fresh local stack and confirm your workflows are there.

Done when: a throwaway stack started from the backup shows the same workflows and credentials decrypt.

Hint

Same .env (especially N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY), start only postgres, pipe the dump into psql, then start n8n.

Exercise 3: Protect your webhooks

Task: Require a secret header on /webhook/ops/health so only your monitor can call it.

Done when: calls without the header get 403; calls with it work.

Hint

Webhook node → Authentication → Header Auth, with a credential holding the header name and secret.