Greenlight

A self-hosted approval broker between your automations and you.

Your automation asks for permission → you get a push notification → you tap Approve or Reject → the automation continues. Don't answer in time and a configurable default fires automatically.

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How it works

1. An automation hits POST /api/requests with its details and its n8n Wait-node resume URL.
2. Greenlight stores it, then pushes a notification with a deep link.
3. You open the link and Approve or Reject (optionally with a comment).
4. Greenlight calls the resume URL — the workflow continues down the right branch.
5. No response before the timeout? The default action fires and resumes the workflow the same way, marked as auto-decided.

→ Full walkthrough with sequence & state diagrams in docs/architecture.md.

Features

• 🟢 One-tap approvals from a clean, mobile-friendly web UI (installable as a PWA).
• ⏱️ Timeout defaults per source/category — approve or reject automatically if you're away.
• 🔁 Restart-safe & exactly-once — deadlines survive restarts; a decision racing a timeout resolves exactly once.
• 📡 Push via your own ntfy — or run notification-free and just watch the dashboard.
• 🔒 Built to expose — API-key auth, rate-limited login, HMAC sessions, CSRF, hashed keys.
• 📦 Single self-contained binary — Go + embedded templates/assets + SQLite. No external services required.

Quick start

Local (no Docker):

export GREENLIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD='pick-a-password'
export GREENLIGHT_SESSION_SECRET="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"
export GREENLIGHT_PUBLIC_URL='http://localhost:8080'

go run ./cmd/greenlight

Open http://localhost:8080 and log in. The first run prints a bootstrap API key to the logs — use it as the X-API-Key header for /api/*.

Create a test request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/requests \
  -H "X-API-Key: <your-key>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "title": "Deploy v2.1 to prod",
        "source": "manual-test",
        "priority": "high",
        "timeout_seconds": 300,
        "default_action": "reject",
        "resume_url": "https://webhook.site/your-uuid"
      }'

It appears on the dashboard; approving/rejecting POSTs the decision to resume_url.

Docker: see docs/deployment.md.

Documentation

Guide
🏗️ Architecture	Components, flow, lifecycle, timeout engine.
⚙️ Configuration	Env vars + default-rule resolution.
🔌 API reference	Endpoints, payloads, callback shape.
🔧 n8n integration	Wait-node wiring + importable workflow.
📡 Notifications	ntfy setup.
🚀 Deployment	Docker, tunnels, backups.
🔒 Security	Auth model & guarantees.
🛠️ Development	Build, test, layout.

Tech stack

Go (net/http + html/template) · SQLite (mattn/go-sqlite3) · HTMX (vendored, no build step) · a background goroutine for the timeout engine. Everything ships in one binary.

_{Built to keep a human in the loop, without keeping a human at their desk.}