AI Agent nodes read their endpoint from a stored credential, not from the
environment, so the gateway base URL and this role's virtual key have to land in
n8n's credential store. files/provision_ai.py logs in as the owner and upserts an
openAiApi credential under the deterministic name infinito:litellm.
The write goes through the internal /rest routes because that is the only place
the pinned 1.95.3 exposes credential creation: the public /api/v1 key this role
already mints for MCP carries workflow scopes and cannot create a credential.
That is why this is a second script rather than another call inside
provision_mcp.py.
n8n encrypts credential data at rest and never returns it, so there is nothing
to compare against and the managed credential is overwritten rather than
reconciled. The script prints CHANGED or OK so the task can report change state
without pretending to have diffed a value it cannot read.
env.j2 sets only N8N_AI_ENABLED. An earlier revision of this work templated
N8N_INSTANCE_AI_MODEL_URL, which does not exist in 1.95.3 -- it was invented
rather than measured, and has been removed along with the requirement table row
that repeated it. The one real AI environment variable in that release,
N8N_AI_ASSISTANT_BASE_URL, expects n8n's own assistant service rather than an
OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so the credential store is the only usable surface.
vars/main.yml also carries N8N_MCP_CREDENTIAL_NAME. It belongs to the MCP work
rather than to this change, but a file cannot be split across commits and this
order is the safe one: the MCP tasks land later and find the constant already
present, where the reverse would reference a variable that does not exist yet.
Verified: the spec runs rather than skipping -- it appears in the variant-2
JUnit as "administrator: the managed openAiApi credential answers a prompt
through the in-cluster gateway".
Not verified: I confirmed it executed, not its verdict. The owner-cookie login
is also unexercised on an sso-only variant, and because the credential is
rewritten every run, an operator's manual edit is replaced without notice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
n8n is the only role that speaks MCP in both directions, consuming other
servers and serving one of its own.
The provisioner carries the auth cookie by hand rather than through a
CookieJar. n8n sets it with Secure, which is right for the browser-facing
origin, so a jar drops it over the plain-http internal address and every call
after the login answers 401. Setting N8N_SECURE_COOKIE=false would have fixed
the provisioning at the cost of the cookie the browser actually relies on, so
the session is carried explicitly instead.
The mcp role is declared in the role's rbac metadata, without which the group
path lookup hard-fails, and a Playwright spec proves the surface serves a guest
nothing. That check needs no credential, which is why it belongs in Playwright
while the contract probe with the real bearer stays at deploy time and out of
the trace.
- Community edition with edge oauth2-proxy SSO (Decision #1b)
- PostgreSQL backend via svc-db-postgres
- Three variants: V1 sso+ldap, V2 no-auth, V3 ldap-only
- Bootstrap owner account via /api/v1/owner/setup
- LDAP config via direct PostgreSQL upsert (CE API limitation)
- Playwright: baseline, CSP, OIDC, administrator and biber personas
- All 5 active tests pass, 2 skipped correctly for this variant
kevinveenbirkenbachandClaude Opus 5
Prageeth Panicker