n8n patch blitz and Temporal's breaking protobuf upgrade

n8n's week of hardening

n8n dominated the week with a rapid succession of patch releases, most fixing infrastructure-level issues rather than flashy features. The standout fix came in n8n 2.37.1, which ensures OAuth2 token requests route through environment proxies in every process — a critical correction for self-hosted deployments behind corporate proxies, where previously only certain worker processes respected the proxy configuration, causing intermittent auth failures.

The 2.36.7 patch focused on API correctness: it adapted the binary data endpoint to match expected response formats and began requiring a JSON content type on decorator routes that accept a body. The latter is a subtle behavioral change that could break custom integrations sending application/x-www-form-urlencoded payloads to those routes, so API consumers should verify their requests still pass. This release also included the first part of the distroless runner fix.

The distroless runner saga continued with 2.37.3, which staged the libatomic library into the minimal runner image. This library is required for certain atomic operations in compiled JavaScript addons, and its absence caused crashes in environments using native modules. The fix appears in both the current 2.37 line and the LTS-style 2.36 branch via 2.36.8, ensuring users on either track get the correction. The 2.37.2 release (same as 2.36.8's content) confirmed the staged library works.

Rounding out the week, 2.37.0 brought the Agent Node improvement to show disabled reasons on prompt-source options — a small UX win that saves users from guessing why a configuration option is greyed out. The 2.36.6 patch fixed the Instance AI landing page to properly display the personalization survey and community registration modal, which had been failing to appear for new users.

Temporal's protobuf migration

On the workflow orchestration side, Temporal's TypeScript SDK hit v1.23.0 with a major internal upgrade: protobufjs jumped to v8 and protobufjs-cli to v2. This is breaking because Temporal exposes generated protobuf message types as part of its public API — particularly through @temporalio/proto and the raw gRPC interfaces on Client. Most applications won't touch these types directly, but if you're doing advanced gRPC calls or inspecting wire-level messages, you'll need to recompile or adapt your type references. The upgrade also brings newer protobuf language features, so any custom proto definitions compiled against the older toolchain may need regeneration.