n8n's webhook, form and mcp endpoints carry no authentication of their own, and
for an automation platform those endpoints are the platform: whatever a
workflow reads or changes answers an unauthenticated request. The editor's
login protects the editor and nothing else.
N8N_WEBHOOK_AUTH_URL is required rather than optional — there is no way to
deploy this without naming an authenticator.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every environment value is a ${VAR} for the caller to substitute: hostname,
images, storage, ingress class, TLS issuer, Vault server and path, timezone,
retention. Nothing in k8s/ names a host, a realm, an agent or an estate.
Removed: the Flux plumbing under dev/, which described one deployment, and the
ExternalSecret pulling a specific agent's Keycloak client secret. Both belong to
whoever deploys this. The lab CA ConfigMap goes with them — the mount stays,
parameterised and marked optional, because 'trust a private CA' is a property of
an environment and not of n8n.
The README is now the template's: how to consume it, what every variable means,
and the three things it deliberately does not do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The runtime for the estate's autonomous agents. Postgres as a StatefulSet with
its own claim, n8n behind a cert-manager certificate and the nginx ingress, and
both secrets in Vault behind an AppRole scoped to n8n/* alone.
The certificate is issued into the cluster rather than copied into the repo, so
the private key never reaches git. The CA certificate is committed and mounted
as NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS, so a workflow can reach keycloak and the domain
gateways without anyone disabling verification to make it work.
One replica and strategy: Recreate, both deliberate — n8n needs Redis and queue
mode before a second scheduler is safe, and a ReadWriteOnce volume deadlocks a
rolling update.
N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY is generated once and kept in Vault. Regenerating it does not
re-encrypt the stored credentials, it orphans them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stéphane Tailland