Automate WordPress publishing with n8n: draft → review → live

You can wire a full WordPress publishing pipeline — draft created, sent for review, then published live — using n8n and a local WordPress site, both running on your Mac. ReDock hosts WordPress and n8n as one-click stacks with real HTTPS .test domains, so the two talk to each other over the WordPress REST API without any cloud services or terminal work. The result is an automation that moves a post through your editorial stages on a trigger.

The pipeline in plain terms

Editorial publishing is a state machine: content starts as a draft, someone reviews it, and on approval it goes live. n8n models that cleanly. A trigger creates or picks up a draft, a step routes it for review (a Slack message, an email, a status change), and once approved, an n8n node flips the post to publish via the REST API.

Doing this against a local WordPress install used to mean standing up a LAMP stack and a separate n8n container and getting them to trust each other’s certificates. ReDock — a free (alpha) native macOS app — runs both as native stacks. Your WordPress site gets a trusted https://something.test domain, and so does n8n, so the REST calls between them just work. The WordPress side is covered in local WordPress environment.

Building draft → review → live

The three stages map to n8n nodes:

Draft. A trigger — a Cron pulling from a content queue, a webhook from your CMS front-end, or a manual run — creates a post via POST /wp-json/wp/v2/posts with status: draft. You get back a post ID.
Review. n8n sends a notification with the draft’s preview link to whoever approves. This can be a Slack node, an email, or a row in a tracking sheet. The flow pauses here — either waiting on a webhook callback (“approved”) or checking a status field on the next run.
Live. On approval, a node calls POST /wp-json/wp/v2/posts/{id} with status: publish. The post goes live. n8n can then fan out — ping your social scheduler, purge a cache, notify the author.

The review step often uses an inbound webhook (the approver clicks a link that hits n8n). That needs a public URL, which ReDock’s Cloudflare tunnel provides — see webhooks on localhost.

Authentication done right

The REST API needs credentials. WordPress application passwords are the clean path: create one in the site’s user profile, store it in an n8n credential, and every REST call authenticates without exposing your main password. Because the site runs over real HTTPS, those credentials travel encrypted even in local development — no plain-text-over-http compromise.

If you’d rather have an agent operate the WordPress site directly instead of hand-wiring REST calls, ReDock exposes WordPress itself as MCP tools — creating posts, changing status, checking rendered output — on localhost:47200. That’s a different route to the same outcome; see WordPress over MCP and the MCP docs.

Why keep it local

A local pipeline lets you build and test the whole flow — including the review round-trip — before anything touches your production site. You can run the same n8n workflow against your live WordPress by swapping the base URL and credentials. Nothing about the flow changes; only the target does. And since both halves are self-hosted, there’s no per-execution SaaS bill for the automation, matching the pattern in n8n on your Mac, one click.

One honest limit: scheduled stages fire only while your Mac is awake and ReDock is running. For building and for personal sites that’s fine; for a newsroom running around the clock, move the finished workflow to a server — it exports as JSON.

FAQ

Does this work with my existing theme and plugins?

Yes. The pipeline talks to the standard WordPress REST API, which is theme- and plugin-agnostic. Your local ReDock site can mirror your production setup so you test against the real thing.

How does the review approval reach n8n?

Typically via a webhook — the approver clicks an approve link that posts to an n8n Webhook node. ReDock’s tunnel gives that node a public URL. See webhooks on localhost.

Can I move this to production later?

Yes. Change the REST base URL and credentials to your live site and the same workflow runs. n8n workflows export as JSON, so moving the automation to an always-on server is a copy.

A draft-to-live pipeline you built and understand beats a black-box plugin. Download ReDock and wire yours today.