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Challenge 19
Birthdays You'll Never Forget
Keep a birthday list in n8n and get a warm message every morning for whoever is celebrating today.
Your bonus task
Send a second, earlier reminder three days before each birthday, so there is still time to organise a present.
Example use cases
- A small team that wants to congratulate colleagues without one person having to remember every date.
- A family spread over three countries, where the cousins' birthdays quietly slip past.
- Any yearly reminder that repeats on the same day and month – anniversaries, renewals, inspections or vaccinations.
Before you start
- 01
Sign up for n8n Cloud or open your n8n workspace. No other account is needed, and no data leaves n8n except the message you send.
- 02
Create a Data Table called birthdays with three text columns: name, birthday and note. Store the birthday as YYYY-MM-DD, for example 1991-07-04.
- 03
Add at least five rows, including someone born on a 29 February – 2016-02-29 works well – so you can test the edge case.
- 04
To receive the message, use ntfy.sh: pick a hard-to-guess topic name and open https://ntfy.sh/your-topic in a browser or install the ntfy app. No account is needed. A Telegram bot from challenge 2 works just as well.
- 05
Set the workflow's time zone in its Settings, so that "today" changes at your midnight and not somewhere else.
Nodes you'll use
What the workflow must do
- 01
Running the workflow sends one message per person whose birthday is today, naming them and the age they turn, and sends nothing at all on a day when nobody is celebrating.
- 02
The year in the stored date never affects the match: someone born in 1950 and someone born in 2015 are both found on their day.
- 03
A person born on 29 February is greeted on 28 February in ordinary years and on 29 February in leap years, and never twice. Bonus: a separate reminder goes out three days before each birthday.
Tip
Need a tip?
Reveal up to five tips, one at a time.
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Solution
See the workflow challenge answer
Reveal the completed workflow only when you are ready to compare it with your own.
Submit as solved
Ready to submit?
Submit when your team has a working workflow to demonstrate.