Description

n8n-nodes-stirling-pdf

An n8n community node for Stirling PDF — a powerful, self‑hostable toolkit for manipulating PDFs. This node lets your workflows convert, compress, OCR, watermark, redact, sign, inspect and fill PDFs by calling your own Stirling PDF instance.

n8n is a fair-code licensed workflow automation platform.

• Installation
• Credentials
• Usage
• Supported operations
• Notes & limitations
• Compatibility
• Resources

Installation

From the n8n UI (self‑hosted)

1. In n8n, go to Settings → Community Nodes.
2. Select Install.
3. Enter n8n-nodes-stirling-pdf and confirm.

See the n8n community node installation guide for details.

Manually

npm install n8n-nodes-stirling-pdf

Credentials

This node talks to your Stirling PDF instance, so you need two things:

| Field | Description |
| — | — |
| Base URL | The root URL of your Stirling PDF instance, without a trailing slash — e.g. https://stirling.example.com. |
| API Key | Sent as the X-API-KEY header on every request. |

To obtain an API key, enable authentication on your Stirling PDF instance and copy the key from your account settings (Account settings → API key). See the Stirling PDF API documentation for how to enable and manage keys.

The credential test calls the public GET /api/v1/info/status endpoint to confirm the Base URL points at a reachable Stirling instance.

Usage

Every operation reads a file from an input binary property and (for most operations) writes the result to an output binary property:

• Input Data Field Name — the name of the incoming binary property that holds the file to process (default data).
• Output Data Field Name — the name of the binary property to write the result to (default data).

The result is a proper binary item with a filename, so it shows a Download button in the editor and can be passed straight to downstream nodes (e.g. Write Files From Disk, Send Email attachment, Google Drive, or another Stirling PDF step). Inspection operations (Analysis, Get Fields, Get Info, Validate Signature) return JSON instead of a binary file.

HTML → PDF and Markdown → PDF additionally accept a raw text string instead of a file — switch the Input Type to Text and paste the markup directly.

Merge takes several files from the same item: list their binary properties in Input Data Field Names, separated by commas and in merge order (e.g. data, data_1). To merge files that arrive as separate items, combine them into one item first (e.g. with the Aggregate node and Include Binaries).

The output file name is the input file’s base name plus the extension of the file the server returned. When the server only sends a generic application/octet-stream — as Stirling does for ZIP results (Split Pages, PDF to Image with one image per page) — the type is taken from the response’s Content-Disposition file name, or else recognised from the file’s first bytes (ZIP, PDF, PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP). ZIP results therefore come out as .zip with type application/zip and can go straight into the Compression node.

Supported operations

Convert

• File to PDF (via LibreOffice)
• HTML to PDF (binary file or text string)
• Markdown to PDF (binary file or text string)
• Image to PDF
• eBook to PDF
• EML to PDF
• PDF to CSV
• PDF to HTML
• PDF to Image
• PDF to Markdown
• PDF to PDF/A
• PDF to Text
• PDF to Word
• PDF to XML

Security

• Add Password
• Remove Password
• Add Watermark (text or image)
• Auto Redact
• Redact
• Sanitize
• Get PDF Info (JSON)
• Timestamp
• Sign With Certificate
• Remove Certificate Signature
• Validate Signature (JSON)

Forms

• Fill
• Get Fields (JSON)
• Get Fields With Coordinates (JSON)

General

• Merge (several files into one PDF)
• Split Pages (ZIP of the parts, or a PDF when there is only one)

Analysis (JSON)

• Get Basic Info
• Get Form Fields
• Get Security Info

Misc

• Compress
• Extract Images
• OCR
• Add Stamp (text or image)

Notes & limitations

• This node targets the Stirling PDF “Processing” API (/api/v1/...). It is built from the OpenAPI spec bundled in docs/stirling-pdf-api.json (Stirling PDF v2.14.2).
• Some features are instance‑dependent. Endpoints such as OCR (needs Tesseract language packs), Timestamp (needs outbound access to a Time Stamp Authority), and certificate signing/validation may be disabled or unavailable depending on how your Stirling PDF instance is configured. In that case the API returns an error even though the node is calling it correctly.
• URL → PDF is not included because the upstream endpoint is currently unreliable in API mode.

Compatibility

Requires n8n 1.60.0 or later.

Resources

• Stirling PDF website
• Stirling PDF documentation
• Stirling PDF API documentation
• Stirling PDF on GitHub
• Bundled OpenAPI spec
• n8n community nodes documentation

License

MIT