n8n 2.36.6 - Instance AI Landing Modals

n8n published [email protected] on 24 August 2026. The tag is a stable patch, not a prerelease, and it carries one editor bug fix: the personalization survey and community registration modal now show on the Instance AI landing page. Workflow execute paths, queue workers, and node runtimes are not in this release.

The full release notes and downloads are on the GitHub release page.

Self hosted n8n sends new owners to /assistant after first setup when Instance AI is on. The survey and community registration modal still lived on the homepage views. Completing owner setup did not show those modals until someone opened Home, or until the assistant opened a workflow artifact that embeds NodeView and fired the same UI mid conversation.

That is an editor routing mismatch, not a data path bug. The landing route and the modal trigger were different views. The notes point at #36826 and commit 8a38897. The diff is two Vue files under packages/frontend/editor-ui.

For a locked down instance the practical result is mixed. The survey now appears when the owner first reaches the assistant, so onboarding prompts are harder to miss. If you did not want a community registration modal on a private editor, this patch makes that prompt more reliable, not less.

InstanceAiView.vue now imports useUsersStore and calls usersStore.showPersonalizationSurvey() inside onMounted. The commit comment is blunt: new owners land here instead of the homepage, so the signup sequence has to start on this view. The sequence is still the personalization survey, then the community registration modal after submit.

PersonalizationModal.vue gained an isInstanceAiChatRoute check. The close callback used to call router.replace toward VIEWS.HOMEPAGE whenever the current route was not already Home. After this patch, an Instance AI chat route stays on /assistant. Closing the survey no longer bounces the owner back to the homepage.

When Instance AI is off, the old path remains. Setup still goes to /home/workflows and the modals still fire there. The project’s own check for that regression uses N8N_DISABLED_MODULES=instance-ai. A fresh owner check in the cited pull request starts with N8N_USER_FOLDER=$(mktemp -d) pnpm start, completes setup, and expects the survey on /assistant, then the community modal, then no redirect away from that route.

None of this edits a workflow graph. It is editor onboarding UI aligned with the post setup redirect.

The compare range is [email protected]@2.36.6. The published notes list one bullet under Bug Fixes, scoped to editor.

There is no listed change to:

  • node execute paths
  • credentials or secret stores
  • queue mode workers
  • webhook entry
  • database migrations
  • REST or public API contracts

If you run n8n as a worker only process and never open the editor, this tag is a no-op for runtime behavior. If you run the editor with Instance AI, the visible difference is a survey plus a community registration modal on /assistant after owner setup, instead of a delayed popup when a workflow canvas loads.

That delayed popup was the worse of the two bugs. Firing a registration modal from an embedded NodeView during an assistant turn puts a blocking dialog on the same page that is trying to edit a workflow. Moving the trigger to view mount is the right place even if you do not care about the survey itself.

Do not read this tag as a security patch, a scheduler fix, or an ETL runner change. It is a two file editor correction on the 2.36 line.

The notes do not list breaking changes or a migration step. Roll this if you want the editor landing to show the survey on /assistant and to stop sending users back to Home when they close it. Skip it if owner setup is already done, Instance AI is disabled, or you only roll worker images.

Keep the editor UI and the API on the same patch when they share one container. There is no worker schema bump in this tag. Confirm the editor bundle actually updated. A stale browser cache keeps the old onMounted path and you will still see the homepage only modal.

The GitHub release page is the artifact list for [email protected].