Automation Playground: Running n8n on My Home Server
How I turned my ancient laptop into an automation hub with n8n, Docker, and Cloudflare Tunnel.
Automation Playground: Running n8n on My Home Server
The purba lives on.
After turning my old Celeron laptop into a home server, I decided to give it a new job:
becoming an automation playground with n8n.
Why n8n?
Because clicking the same buttons every day is slavery.
Automation is liberation.
n8n is open-source, self-hosted, and flexible enough to run on my dinosaur hardware.
I don’t want to rely on SaaS for everything.
I want my own workflows, on my own metal, under my own domain.
The Setup
- Hardware: my resurrected laptop purba (2GB RAM, Debian minimal).
- Runtime: Docker container running n8n.
- Access: Cloudflare Tunnel, exposing n8n through a custom domain.
Now, my n8n instance is publicly accessible through a URL I own, no port forwarding, no ISP headaches.
First Experiments
I started small:
- Basic test flows just to explore n8n’s interface.
- Chaining simple triggers and actions.
- Playing around with APIs.
Nothing fancy yet, but the point is, the pipeline is alive.
The purba can now automate.
Why This Matters
This is more than running another web app.
This is about:
- Owning my automation stack
- Learning how to orchestrate workflows
- Proving old hardware can still add value
And of course, building the foundation for bigger experiments:
from auto-posting logs, to scraping, to gluing APIs together.
⚡ Brutalist Note
People throw away old laptops.
I turn mine into an automation hub.
This isn’t about nostalgia.
This is about power, the power to automate life, on my own terms.