13.1: Verifying Your Lightning Setup

ℹ️ NOTE: This is a draft in progress, so that I can get some feedback from early reviewers. It is not yet ready for learning.

📖 What is Lightning Network?

Lightning Network is a decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the bitcoin blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants. Lightning is builded like a layer-2 protocol that interacts with Bitcoin to allow users to exchange their bitcoins "off-chain".

This tutorial uses the standard-compliant c-lightning implementation as its trusted Lightning server. Before you start playing with c-lightning, you should ensure that everything is setup correctly.

Create Your Aliases

We suggest creating some aliases to make it easier to use c-lightning.

You can do so by putting them in your .bash_profile.

cat >> ~/.bash_profile <<EOF
alias lndir="cd ~/.lightning/" #linux default c-lightning path
alias lnc="lightning-cli"
alias lnd="lightningd"
alias lninfo='lightning-cli getinfo'
EOF

After you enter these aliases you can either source .bash_profile to input them or just log out and back in.

Note that these aliases includes shortcuts for running lightning-cli, for running lightningd, and for going to the c-lightning directory. These aliases are mainly meant to make your life easier. We suggest you create other aliases to ease your use of frequent commands (and arguments) and to minimize errors. Aliases of this sort can be even more useful if you have a complex setup where you regularly run commands associated with Mainnet, with Testnet, and with Regtest, as explained further below.

With that said, use of these aliases in this document might accidentally obscure the core lessons being taught about c-lightning, so the only alias directly used here is lninfo because it encapsulatea much longer and more complex command. Otherwise, we show the full commands; adjust for your own use as appropriate.

Run lightningd

You'll begin your exploration of the Lightning network with the lightning-cli command. However, lightningd must be running to use lightning-cli, as lightning-cli sends JSON-RPC commands to the lightningd. If you used our standard setup, lightningd should already be up and running. You can double check by looking at the process table.

$ ps auxww | grep lightningd
standup   7817  1.1  0.2  95280  8964 pts/18   D+   14:13   0:00 lightningd --network=testnet

If it's not running, you'll want to run lightningd --network=testnet by hand.

Verify your node

You should have an output like this indicating your node is ready if blockheight shows a height value that match with your most recent number getblockcount bitcoin-cli getblockcount command output.

$ lightning-cli --network=testnet getinfo
{
   "id": "03fce2a20393a65b9d6cab5425f4cd33ddc621ade458efd69d652917e2b5eaf59c",
   "alias": "VIOLENTIRON",
   "color": "03fce2",
   "num_peers": 0,
   "num_pending_channels": 0,
   "num_active_channels": 0,
   "num_inactive_channels": 0,
   "address": [],
   "binding": [
      {
         "type": "ipv6",
         "address": "::",
         "port": 9735
      },
      {
         "type": "ipv4",
         "address": "0.0.0.0",
         "port": 9735
      }
   ],
   "version": "v0.8.2-398-g869fa08",
   "blockheight": 54959,
   "network": "testnet",
   "msatoshi_fees_collected": 0,
   "fees_collected_msat": "0msat",
   "lightning-dir": "/home/user/.lightning/testnet"
}

If node is still sycing with bitcoin network you should see a message like this.

"warning_bitcoind_sync": "Bitcoind is not up-to-date with network."

If your lightning daemon is not up-to-date, you'll get a message to you getinfo command like this:

"warning_lightningd_sync": "Still loading latest blocks from bitcoind."

Optional: Know Your Server Types

TESTNET vs MAINNET: When you set up your node, you choose to create it as either a Mainnet, Testnet, or Regtest node. Though this document presumes a testnet setup, it's worth understanding how you might access and use the other setup types — even all on the same machine! But, if you're a first-time user, skip on past this, as it's not necessary for a basic setup.

When lightningd starts up it usually reads a general configuration file located depending on the network you are using (default: $HOME/.lightning/testnet/config). This can be changed: see –conf and –lightning-dir.

The type of setup is mainly controlled through the ~/.lightning/config file. If you're running testnet, it probably will be located in ~/.lightning/testnet/config. In next section we will explain how to manage your lightning daemon options or general options.

~/.lightning/testnet$ ls -la config
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 267 jul 12 17:08 config
:~/.lightning/testnet$

If you want to run several different sorts of nodes simultaneously, you must leave the testnet (or regtest) flag out of your configuration file. You should then choose whether you're using the mainnet, the testnet, or your regtest every time you run lightningd or lightning-cli.

Summary: Verifying your Lightning setup

Before you start playing with lightning, you should make sure that your aliases are set up, your lightningd is running, and your node is synced. You may also want to set up some access to alternative lightning setups, if you're an advanced user.

What's Next?

Continue "Understanding Your Lightning Setup" with §13.2: Knowing Your Lightning Setup.

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