Developer Documents n8n-to-Ollama and MCP Integration Challenges in Containerised Setup

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A developer building an automated workflow connected n8n, running as a container, to both Ollama and an MCP tool server, encountering multiple technical obstacles along the way. The Ollama integration succeeded using an HTTP Request node pointed at host.docker.internal, though the model responded to an OpenShift CLI question by referencing kubectl instead. Connecting the MCP tool proved harder, as n8n's containerised filesystem cannot access macOS binaries, making stdio transport unworkable and requiring a switch to SSE network transport. Configuring SSE also surfaced an API mismatch, with host and port parameters needing to be passed to the FastMCP constructor rather than the run method. Even after the server started successfully and was verified via curl, n8n still refused the connection, with the developer noting an unresolved question around whether host.docker.internal behaves identically under Podman as it does under Docker Desktop.

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