n8n-nodes-preflight

n8n nodes for Preflight, the social media scheduler that checks every post against each network's real publishing rules before it goes out.

Use it to validate, schedule, queue or publish posts to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram, Discord and Tumblr from any n8n workflow, and to react when a post is published or fails.

n8n is a fair-code licensed workflow automation platform.

• Installation
• Credentials
• Operations
• Trigger
• Example workflows
• Usage notes
• Compatibility
• Resources
• Version history

Installation

Follow the installation guide in the n8n community nodes documentation and install n8n-nodes-preflight.

The package has no runtime dependencies. Every release is built and published by GitHub Actions with npm provenance.

Credentials

1. Sign in to Preflight (every plan, Free included, has API access) and connect your social accounts there. Accounts are connected in the Preflight app, not through the API.

2. Go to Settings → API keys and create a key. Give it the scopes your workflows need:

   Scope	Needed for
   posts:read	Channels, Get / Get Many posts, queue times, and the credential test
   posts:write	Drafts, Update and Delete of drafts
   posts:publish	Anything that goes live: scheduling, queueing, publishing now, retrying
   media:read, media:write	Media → Upload / Get / Delete
   webhooks:read, webhooks:write	The Preflight Trigger

3. In n8n, create a Preflight API credential and paste the key. Leave Base URL as https://preflight.social unless you run Preflight somewhere else.

The credential test calls GET /v1/oauth/accounts, so the key needs posts:read for the test to pass.

Operations

Post

Media

Channel

Choosing channels

Pick channels from the list, or pass them with an expression as a comma-separated string or an array:

• bluesky:3f2c9a1e-…: network and channel ID, as the list returns them
• mastodon: just the network name, when the workspace has one channel there

That makes channels easy to keep in a spreadsheet column such as bluesky, linkedin.

Per-network options

Network Options has fields for the settings people use most (YouTube title, privacy, tags and Short; TikTok privacy and inbox; Instagram placement; Pinterest board and title; first comment). Options JSON takes anything else, keyed by network, and is merged over those fields:

{
  "youtube": { "categoryId": "22", "playlistId": "PL…" },
  "bluesky": { "caption": "A shorter text just for Bluesky" }
}

The full list is in Preflight's network options documentation.

Trigger

Preflight Trigger starts a workflow on:

• post.failed: a channel refused the post and Preflight has stopped retrying. Sent once per channel, with error, permanent and attempts.
• post.published: the post is live on a channel, with remoteId and remoteUrl. Sent once per channel.

Activating the workflow registers a webhook in Preflight. Deactivating it removes the webhook. Every delivery is signed (x-preflight-signature-v2: t=<unix>,v2=<HMAC-SHA256 of "t.body">). The trigger checks the signature against the secret Preflight returned at registration and refuses anything unsigned, tampered with or older than five minutes.

Output:

{
  "event": "post.failed",
  "deliveryId": "3b9f0c6d-1a2e-4f7b-8c5d-6e4a2b1f9c08",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-16T15:50:00.000Z",
  "postId": "7c1e4b2a-9d3f-4e8a-b6c5-2f0a1d9e3b47",
  "targetId": "5b1e…",
  "platform": "pinterest",
  "error": "Board not found. Choose another board.",
  "permanent": true,
  "attempts": 1
}

Preflight only delivers to public https addresses. A self-hosted n8n on localhost needs WEBHOOK_URL (or N8N_WEBHOOK_URL) set to a tunnel such as Cloudflare Tunnel or ngrok. deliveryId stays the same across retries of one event, so you can deduplicate on it.

Example workflows

The templates folder has five ready-to-import workflows. Download the JSON and use Import from File in n8n.

Each template has a sticky note explaining its setup. They are generated by templates/build.py; see templates/README.md.

A minimal example

Validate first, then save a draft only if every network accepts it:

Manual Trigger
  → Preflight (Post → Validate, channels: bluesky, mastodon; text: "Hello from n8n")
  → If ({{ $json.ok }} is true)
      true  → Preflight (Post → Create, When: Draft, same channels and text)
      false → (handle {{ $json.issues }})

Usage notes

• Idempotency. Every Create sends an Idempotency-Key. The default {{ $execution.id }}-{{ $itemIndex }} makes n8n's Retry on Fail safe. For content that may be seen twice (RSS items, sheet rows) use something stable, e.g. {{ 'rss-' + $json.link.hash('sha256') }}: the same key returns the first post instead of creating a second. The same key with different text is refused.
• Publish Now needs confirming. Choosing Publish Now also requires Confirm Publish Now, so a test run cannot publish by accident.
• Times. Scheduled Time accepts ISO 8601 with a zone, or a wall-clock time such as 2026-11-02 09:30, which is read in the workflow's time zone. A time more than five minutes in the past is refused by Preflight (scheduled_in_past), so an old item can never go out straight away.
• Files must be ready. Upload waits for that by default. If you turn waiting off, check Media → Get before creating the post.
• TikTok never takes links in the text (Preflight refuses them), and needs a privacy level.
• Errors carry Preflight's own code and message (for example validation_failed with each issue, or post_limit with the plan's allowance), and work with n8n's Continue On Fail.
• The action node can be used as a tool by n8n's AI Agent.

Compatibility

• Tested with n8n 2.43.7 (self-hosted, Node.js 24).
• Built with @n8n/node-cli 0.52, n8nNodesApiVersion 1, strict mode (n8n Cloud eligible).
• Preflight REST API v1 (https://preflight.social/v1). Get Next Queue Times uses the same API key against Preflight's MCP endpoint (/mcp), because the REST queue endpoint is not yet open to API keys.

Resources

• Preflight API documentation
• OpenAPI schema
• Webhooks · Errors · Network options
• n8n community nodes documentation
• Support: GitHub issues or info@preflight.social

Version history

See CHANGELOG.md.

• 0.1.1: release pipeline only (staged, provenance-signed publishing from GitHub Actions).
• 0.1.0: first release. Preflight node (Post, Media, Channel) and Preflight Trigger (post.published, post.failed).