n8nCapture: a right-click web clipper for n8n (turn browsing into structured input)

Most automation stacks fail for one simple reason:

You don’t have clean inputs.

You have “a thread I saw,” “a DM I meant to follow up on,” “a bug report buried in a forum,” “a spicy quote someone posted,” and zero pipeline to turn that into something usable.

n8nCapture fixes that by making your browser a data intake tool.

It’s a lightweight WebExtension that sends selected text + page metadata to an n8n webhook via HTTP POST. GitHub

What it does

Select text → right-click → choose a target → it POSTs JSON to your n8n workflow. GitHub

Key features from the repo:

• Right-click → Send to n8n
• Multiple targets/endpoints (each target becomes its own context-menu entry + webhook URL)
• Includes page context (URL, title, domain, timestamp, user agent, target key)
• n8n-friendly JSON payload
• Optional shared-secret header for simple auth GitHub

This is exactly the kind of “boring glue” that makes automations real.

Example payload

The extension ships with a clear payload model like:

{
"text": "This platform is great but I wish it had a simpler automation setup.",
"url": "https://example.com/some-thread",
"title": "Random discussion about tooling",
"domain": "example.com",
"target": "leads",
"createdAt": "2025-12-09T07:00:00.000Z",
"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 ...",
"extra": {}
}

And optionally a header like:

x-n8n-webclip-token: YOUR_SHARED_SECRET GitHub

Install (dev-mode, fast)

Repo’s approach is straightforward:

1. Clone repo
2. Load unpacked in Chrome/Chromium (chrome://extensions/ → Developer mode → Load unpacked)
3. Firefox temporary load via about:debugging GitHub

No build step. No bundler. Just files.

Configure targets (the part that makes it useful)

Targets are the real trick: each “target” is basically a named route into your automation brain.

A target typically has:

• Label (what you see in the menu)
• Slug/key (what’s sent as target)
• Webhook URL
• Optional token + optional header name GitHub

This lets you clip the same kind of content into different buckets:

• leads_reddit
• support_snippets
• competitor_notes
• feature_requests
• meme_fuel

Build the matching n8n workflow (minimal + scalable)

The README’s recommended pattern is the correct one:

1. Webhook (POST) trigger
2. Optional IF/Switch on target
3. DataTable/DB insert (store the raw clip)
4. Downstream processing (AI summary/categorization, enrichment, notifications, outreach) GitHub

Here’s a practical “don’t overthink it” flow that scales:

Node 1 — Webhook

• Method: POST
• Respond immediately (200) so the extension feels instant

Node 2 — Auth check (optional but recommended)

• If header token mismatch → return 401/403

Node 3 — Normalize

• Trim text
• Drop clips below a minimum length
• Add campaign/source tags based on target and domain

Node 4 — Store raw

• Save the full JSON
• Store the page URL + a hash so you can de-dupe

Node 5+ — Enrich / classify / act

• Summarize into a “one-liner”
• Classify pain/intent
• Route to CRM/email/Discord/whatever

This is how you build a dataset without pretending you’ll “remember it later.”

Security notes (don’t expose your webhook like it’s 2012)

Repo guidance is sensible:

• Only sends data to the webhook URLs you configure
• Config is stored locally in extension storage
• Use HTTPS
• Use token+header if webhook is public GitHub

If you’re hosting n8n on Opalstack, you can keep it sane by putting it behind HTTPS and adding a simple token check.

Why this matters

n8n is incredible at actions, but it’s still fed by inputs.

n8nCapture turns your day-to-day browsing into structured, queryable, automatable data—with almost no friction.

Right-click. Clip. Automate.