BookStack

Overview

This node integrates with the BookStack API to manage digital documentation resources such as books, pages, chapters, and shelves. It supports creating, updating, retrieving, listing, deleting, exporting, and searching these resources. The node can operate in two modes: automatic, where it interprets a natural language description of the desired action to determine the resource and operation; and manual, where the user explicitly selects the resource and operation.

For the Create Book operation specifically, the node allows users to create a new book resource in BookStack by specifying its name and optionally a description. This is useful for automating documentation workflows, such as programmatically adding new books based on external triggers or inputs.

Practical examples:

• Automatically create a new book titled "API Documentation" when a new project starts.
• Manually create a book with a specific name and description via workflow parameters.
• Use natural language input like "Create a new book about marketing strategies" to have the node parse and execute the creation.

Properties

Output

The node outputs JSON data representing the response from the BookStack API after creating the book. This typically includes details of the newly created book resource such as its ID, name, description, creation timestamps, and other metadata as returned by the API.

No binary data output is produced by this operation.

Example output structure (simplified):

{
  "id": 123,
  "name": "My New Book",
  "description": "A description of the book",
  "created_at": "2024-01-01T12:00:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2024-01-01T12:00:00Z",
  ...
}

Dependencies

• Requires an API key credential for authenticating with the BookStack API.
• The node expects the base URL of the BookStack instance and authentication tokens to be configured in the credentials.
• HTTP requests are made to the BookStack REST API endpoints under /api/books.

Troubleshooting

• Common issues:

  • Missing or invalid API credentials will cause authentication failures.
  • Providing an empty or missing required "Name" property will result in validation errors from the API.
  • Network connectivity issues to the BookStack server will cause request failures.
  • If using automatic mode, ambiguous or unclear request descriptions may lead to incorrect resource or operation detection.

• Error messages:

  • Authentication errors: Check that the API token and base URL are correctly set in credentials.
  • Validation errors from API: Ensure all required fields like "Name" are provided and valid.
  • HTTP errors (e.g., 404, 500): Verify the BookStack server is reachable and the endpoint exists.

Links and References

• BookStack Official API Documentation
• BookStack GitHub Repository
• n8n Documentation on Creating Custom Nodes