Installing the Circus n8n Nodes

Before you can place a single Circus node, the package has to be installed in your n8n instance. This is step zero — on a fresh n8n, the Init, Agent, Log, Complete, and Terminate nodes won't exist until you add them.

The package

The nodes ship as an n8n community node package, published to npm as @circus_sh/n8n-nodes-circus.

A naming gotcha worth flagging: the npm scope uses an underscore — @circus_sh — while the GitHub organization uses a hyphen — circus-sh. They differ on purpose; use the wrong one and it won't resolve. When you install, it's the underscore npm scope you want.

Self-hosted n8n

If you run your own n8n (the common case), install it the way you install any community node — through n8n's Settings → Community Nodes → Install — giving it the package name @circus_sh/n8n-nodes-circus. Once installed, the five Circus nodes appear in the node panel like any built-in node.

n8n Cloud

n8n Cloud is stricter about community nodes: it requires packages to go through n8n's verification (the Creator Portal) before they can be installed. That verification is a go-to-market step that isn't complete yet, so at the time of writing the nodes are installed on self-hosted instances. If you're on Cloud, a self-hosted n8n is the path for now.

After installing

With the package in place, you're ready to build. The very next thing every Circus workflow needs is its entry point — a webhook trigger and the Init node — which is covered in The First Steps. You'll also configure a couple of credentials (the Circus API key, and your AI provider keys); those are covered where they're first used.