This project was originally started to follow along with the official Lightning Network Developers tutorial, utilizing a set of VSCode task configurations.
Eventually, though, it became a more general-purpose starter skeleton for setting up a local Lightning Network node cluster, operating it with lnd and lncli, and running bitcoind as a background daemon.
The basic flow for operating a local LND note on your machine is as follows:
- Create a wallet
- Unlock the wallet
- Generate an address for the wallet
- Fund your wallet address
- Connect to peer nodes and open payment channels with them.
- lnd & lncli
- bitcoind & bitcoin-cli
- jq (for running block count scripts)
The only local configuration you should need to do before getting things up and running is setting the externalip option in your lnd.conf files. Additional lnd.conf tweaks can be made as needed.
This project is setup to use the Bitcoin Testnet by default. This is advisable until you feel comfortable with what you're doing.
When you are ready to jump over to Mainnet, be sure to tweak any testnet-specific configuration settings, such as those in lnd.conf and the --macaroonpath argument in .vscode/tasks.json.
If you're looking to open up some initial channel connections, feel free to reach out to me at 037e7ab1c6168741e52601d1c109bcebd315c6415472c6ba746e6c3277bfff5368@71.190.202.78:9735.
If you open up a GitHub Issue to claim your connection (providing a funding transaction ID or node pub key), I'll do my best to reciprocate.