How It Works

This template is a complete, hands-on tutorial for building a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline. In simple terms, you'll teach an AI to become an expert on a specific topic—in this case, the official n8n documentation—and then build a chatbot to ask it questions.

Think of it like this: instead of a general-knowledge AI, you're building an expert librarian.

🔧 Workflow Overview

The workflow is split into two main parts:

Part 1: Indexing the Knowledge (📚 Building the Library)

This is a one-time process you run manually. The workflow will:

• Automatically scrape all pages of the n8n documentation.
• Break them down into small, digestible chunks.
• Use an AI model to create a numerical representation (an embedding) for each chunk.
• Store these embeddings in n8n's built-in Simple Vector Store.

This is like a librarian reading every book and creating a hyper-detailed index card for every paragraph.

⚠️ Important: This in-memory knowledge base is temporary. It will be erased if you restart your n8n instance. You'll need to run the indexing process again in that case.

Part 2: The AI Agent (🧠 The Expert Librarian)

This is the chat interface.

When you ask a question:

1. The AI agent doesn't guess the answer.
2. It searches the knowledge base to find the most relevant “index cards” (chunks).
3. It feeds those chunks to a language model (Gemini) with strict instructions:

   “Answer the user's question using ONLY this information.”

This ensures answers are accurate, factual, and grounded in your documents.

🚀 Setup Steps

Total setup time: ~2 minutes
Indexing time: ~15–20 minutes

This template uses n8n’s built-in tools, so no external database is needed.

1. Configure OpenAI Credentials

• You’ll need an OpenAI API key (for GPT models).
• In your n8n workflow:
  • Go to any of the three OpenAI nodes (e.g., OpenAI Chat Model).
  • Click the Credential dropdown → + Create New Credential.
  • Enter your OpenAI API key and save.

2. Apply Credentials to All Nodes

• Your new credential is now saved.
• Go to the other two OpenAI nodes (e.g., OpenAI Embeddings) and select the newly created credential from the dropdown.

3. Build the Knowledge Base

• Find the Start Indexing manual trigger node (top-left of the workflow).
• Click the Execute Workflow button to start indexing.

⚠️ Be patient: This takes 15–20 minutes to scrape and process the full documentation.
You only need to do this once per n8n session.

4. Chat With Your Expert Agent

• After indexing completes, activate the entire workflow (toggle at the top).
• Open the RAG Chatbot chat trigger node (bottom-left).
• Copy its Public URL.
• Open it in a new tab and ask questions about n8n!

Example questions:

• "How does the IF node work?"
• "What is a sub-workflow?"

👤 Credits

All credits go to Lucas Peyrin
🔗 lucaspeyrin on n8n.io