n8n Workflow: Upload Files to Pinecone via Google Drive & OpenAI

Upload files, embed them with OpenAI, and index into Pinecone—automatically

This n8n workflow lets you POST a file to a webhook, archives the original in Google Drive, then chunks the content, generates OpenAI embeddings, and inserts vectors into your Pinecone index for fast retrieval.

What this workflow does

• Receives uploads via webhook: Accepts a file upload as binary multipart form data using a POST webhook request (the client sends the file in the file field).
• Inspects the file: Detects file name, size, and extension, then calculates dynamic chunk size, chunk overlap, and OpenAI embedding batch size.
• Archives originals in Google Drive: Uploads the original file to a specified Google Drive folder (source copy for traceability).
• Prepares content for embedding: Downloads the same file back from Google Drive, splits it into pages and chunks, and tags chunks with the source filename.
• Creates embeddings and indexes: Generates embeddings using OpenAI and inserts the vectors into the specified Pinecone index.
• Returns a response on completion: The workflow replies to the webhook once indexing finishes.

Use cases

• Build a “document upload” endpoint for your SaaS that immediately makes new uploads searchable.
• Ingest PDFs, text files, or other documents into Pinecone for RAG (retrieval-augmented generation).
• Centralize source documents in Google Drive while keeping an up-to-date Pinecone vector index.

Technical details

• n8n nodes: webhook, code, sticky note, Google Drive, and respond to webhook.
• Embeddings integration: n8n-nodes-langchainembeddings-openai (OpenAI embeddings).
• Vector storage: Pinecone index specified by YOUR_PINECONE_INDEX_NAME.
• Setup: Provide credentials for Google Drive, OpenAI, and Pinecone; set YOUR_GOOGLE_DRIVE_FOLDER_ID; activate the workflow and use the webhook URL.