LMS Certificate Automation with Webhook, Groq & PDFShift

Automate LMS Certificate Issuance end-to-end—triggered by a webhook

This n8n workflow automatically generates and delivers LMS course completion certificates. When your LMS sends a course-completion webhook, it verifies passing status in Google Sheets, personalizes the certificate text with Groq (Llama), renders a styled PDF with PDFShift, logs the issue in Google Sheets, and emails the certificate via Gmail—with Slack alerts if anything goes wrong.

What this workflow does

• Receives a POST webhook at /course-completion containing course_id, student details, score, and completion date.
• Checks pass criteria by looking up the course’s pass threshold and certificate template details from the Google Sheets tab CourseThresholds.
• Stops processing if not passing—the student’s score is compared against the configured threshold.
• Generates personalized certificate text using Groq’s OpenAI-compatible chat completions API with Llama.
• Builds a styled HTML certificate including a generated certificate ID, course name, score, and formatted completion date.
• Converts HTML to PDF with the PDFShift API and prepares the PDF as a binary attachment.
• Logs issuance by appending or updating an IssuedCertificates registry in Google Sheets.
• Emails the PDF certificate to the student using Gmail.
• Notifies on errors by posting workflow error alerts to a configured Slack channel.

Use cases

• Certify learners automatically after LMS course completion without manual review.
• Enforce passing thresholds per course and issue certificates only for eligible students.
• Run a training SaaS that needs consistent, branded PDF certificates with audit logging.

Technical details

• Nodes/integrations: Webhook, IF, Code, Gmail, Slack, PDFShift, Groq (Llama), Google Sheets
• Data sources: CourseThresholds (thresholds/templates) and IssuedCertificates (registry)
• Operations: HTML certificate generation, PDF conversion, Google Sheets logging, email delivery, Slack error alerts