lit - a lightning node you can run on your own

Under development, not for use with real money.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Git

• Go

• make

• (Optional, Windows) Cygwin

• (Optional, for full test suite) Python 3 + requests library from PyPI

Downloading

Clone the repo from git

git clone https://github.com/mit-dci/lit
cd lit

or go get it

go get -v github.com/mit-dci/lit

Installation

Linux, macOS, Cygwin, etc.

You can either use Go's built-in dependency management and build tool

cd {GOPATH}/src/github.com/mit-dci/lit
go get -v ./...
go build

or use the Makefile

make # or make all

To run the python integration tests (which requires bitcoind), run make test with-python=false

Windows

Install Cygwin and follow the setup instructions or download prebuilt binaries from

1. Make sure that environmental variable %GOPATH% is initizlized correctly.

2. Download required dependencies and then build with:

go get -v ./...
cd %GOPATH%\src\github.com\mit-dci\lit
go build -v .
go build -v .\cmd\lit-af

Running lit

The below command will run Lit on the Bitcoin testnet3 network

(Note: Windows users should take off ./ but need to change lit to lit.exe)

./lit --tn3=true

The words yup, yes, y, true, 1, ok, enable, on can be used to specify that Lit automatically connect to peers fetched from a list of DNS seeds. It can also be replaced by the address of the node you wish to connect to. For example for the btc testnet3:

./lit --tn3=localhost

It will use default port for different nodes. See the "Command line arguments" section.

Packaging

You can make an archive package for any distribution by doing:

./build/releasebuild.sh <os> <arch>

and it will be placed in build/_releasedir. It should support any OS that Go and lit's dependencies support. In place of windows use win and in place of 386 use i386.

You can also package for Linux, macOS, and Windows in both amd64 and i386 architectures by running make package. (NOTE: macOS is amd64 only)

Running ./build/releasebuild.sh clean cleans the directories it generates.

Using Lightning

Once you are done setting up lit, you can read about

• the different command line arguments
• the various folders or
• checkout the Walkthrough

Contributing

Pull Requests and Issues are most welcome, checkout Contributing to get started.

Command line arguments

When starting lit, the following command line arguments are available. The following commands may also be specified in lit.conf which is automatically generated on startup with tn3=1 by default.

Connecting to networks

Other settings

Folders

Hierarchy of packages

One instance of lit has one litNode (package qln).

LitNodes manage lndc connections to other litnodes, manage all channels, rpc listener, and the ln.db. Litnodes then initialize and contol wallits.

A litNode can have multiple wallits; each must have different params. For example, there can be a testnet3 wallit, and a regtest wallit. Eventually it might make sense to support a root key per wallit, but right now the litNode gives a rootPrivkey to each wallet on startup. Wallits each have a db file which tracks utxos, addresses, and outpoints to watch for the upper litNode. Wallits do not directly do any network communication. Instead, wallits have one or more chainhooks; a chainhook is an interface that talks to the blockchain.

One package that implements the chainhook interface is uspv. Uspv deals with headers, wire messages to fullnodes, filters, and all the other mess that is contemporary SPV.

(in theory it shouldn't be too hard to write a package that implements the chainhook interface and talks to some block explorer. Maybe if you ran your own explorer and authed and stuff that'd be OK.)

Dependency graph

License

MIT