n8n-nodes-webhookrelay

Receive webhooks and inbound email in self-hosted n8n — no public IP, no port forwarding, no tunnel, and n8n never exposed to the internet.

n8n community nodes for Webhook Relay. Webhook Relay gives your provider a stable, public URL (or email address), verifies and answers the sender for you, and queues each event. The node then opens an outbound WebSocket from n8n to Webhook Relay and receives events over it — so n8n can stay on localhost or behind a firewall/NAT and never listens for inbound connections. No tunnel, no relay agent, nothing to expose.

Provider ──HTTP──► Webhook Relay (public URL, auth + response)
                        │
        n8n ──outbound WebSocket──┘   ← n8n connects out; nothing inbound

Nodes

| Node | Description | | --- | --- | | Webhook Relay Trigger | Receive HTTP webhooks (Stripe, GitHub, Shopify, …) with endpoint authentication and a custom response. | | Webhook Relay Email Trigger | Trigger a workflow from inbound email sent to a generated address. |

Installation

In n8n: Settings → Community Nodes → Install and enter:

n8n-nodes-webhookrelay

Or install manually in a self-hosted instance:

npm install n8n-nodes-webhookrelay

Credentials

Create an API key (sk-…) at my.webhookrelay.com/tokens and add it as a Webhook Relay API credential (a classic token key/secret pair also works).

Usage

Add a Webhook Relay Trigger, pick a bucket name, optionally set endpoint authentication and the response returned to the sender, then activate the workflow. On activation the node provisions the bucket and a public input in Webhook Relay (enabling streaming so events flow over the socket), logs the public URL (also shown in the dashboard), and opens the WebSocket. Give that URL to your provider — webhooks arrive over the socket.

The node's Public URL field shows the exact URL to hand your provider (e.g. https://<generated>.hooks.webhookrelay.com) — open that dropdown (or click its refresh icon) to load it. The Email Trigger has an Email Address field that works the same way. Bucket and input are find-or-created and never deleted, so the URL/address stays stable.

Test vs activate: Test this trigger captures a single event so you can build the workflow, then stops — that's expected. Activate the workflow to receive events continuously. The connection replies to server pings, sends its own keepalive ping every 15 s, and reconnects immediately if it drops.

Per-output delivery: each trigger also creates an internal output (n8n for the webhook trigger, n8n-email for the email trigger; destination http://localhost, so nothing is ever HTTP-forwarded to it) and subscribes to just that output. This isolates the node from any other outputs on the bucket and lets you tune per-output options in the Webhook Relay dashboard. Note: throttling does pace socket delivery, but durable delivery does not make the socket loss-proof — a passive socket subscriber that's disconnected when an event is published won't receive it later. For guaranteed delivery use the durable pull queue (GET /v1/events) instead. The output is find-or-created and never modified on reuse, so your dashboard settings are preserved.

See the full walkthrough with screenshots in docs/testing-with-n8n.md.

Webhook Trigger

Webhook Trigger node allows you to receive HTTP webhooks (Stripe, GitHub, Shopify, …) with endpoint authentication and a custom response. You don't need to expose your n8n instance to the internet, and you can use it with any provider that supports webhooks. All request parameters like body, headers, path, etc. are available as variables in the workflow.

Email Trigger

Webhook Relay Email Trigger node allows you to trigger a workflow from inbound email sent to a generated address. Once you configure the node, you will see your unique inbox address in the node's configuration. You can then send an email to this address to trigger the workflow.

Then, you can view it as well in the Webhook Relay's console:

with example payload:

{
    "from": "[email protected]",
    "from_name": "Karolis Rusenas",
    "recipient": "[email protected]",
    "to": [
        "[email protected]"
    ],
    "subject": "hello n8n",
    "date": "Sat, 4 Jul 2026 15:08:13 +0400",
    "message_id": "[email protected]",
    "text": "Hello,\r\n\r\nTesting n8n integration\r\n",
    "headers": {        
        "Content-Transfer-Encoding": "7bit",
        "Content-Type": "text/plain; charset=us-ascii",
        "Date": "Sat, 4 Jul 2026 15:08:13 +0400",
        "From": "Karolis Rusenas <[email protected]>",
        "Message-Id": "<[email protected]>",
        "Mime-Version": "1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 16.0 \\(3826.700.81\\))",
        "Received-Spf": "pass (mx.cloudflare.net: domain of [email protected] designates 2a00:1450:4864:20::334 as permitted sender) receiver=mx.cloudflare.net; client-ip=2a00:1450:4864:20::334; envelope-from=\"[email protected]\"; helo=mail-wm1-x334.google.com;",
        "Return-Path": "<[email protected]>",
        "Subject": "hello n8n",
        "To": "[email protected]",       
        "X-Mailer": "Apple Mail (2.3826.700.81)",
        "X-Received": "by 2002:a05:600c:4e14:b0:493:d282:8298 with SMTP id 5b1f17b1804b1-493d28283f9mr22053095e9.16.1783163305456; Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:08:25 -0700 (PDT)"
    },
    "spf": "none",
    "dkim": "pass",
    "dmarc": "none"
}

Local development

npm install
npm run build          # tsc + copy icons → dist/

Then load the built nodes into a local n8n with the Docker setup in docker/ (see the n8n-local-testing skill):

cd docker && docker compose up
# open http://localhost:5678

The compose file mounts just the built package into ~/.n8n/custom — the nodes have zero runtime dependencies (they use the runtime's built-in WebSocket and n8n's own n8n-workflow), so there's no node_modules to mount and no --tunnel to run. Rebuild and docker compose restart to reload changes.

Compatibility

• n8n >= 1.x (verified on 2.x)
• Zero runtime dependencies. Events are received over the runtime's built-in global WebSocket (Node.js >= 22) — n8n's official images already ship Node 22+/24, so there's nothing to install.

Resources

• Webhook Relay docs
• Webhook Relay API reference
• n8n community nodes

License

MIT