jason-me / node-launcher

Bitcoin and Lightning node launcher for macOS, and Windows

User Guides

1. Please start here!
2. Set up Zap Desktop
3. Open a channel with Zap Desktop
4. Send a payment with the Joule Chrome extension

Requirements

1. ~300 GB of download bandwidth
2. ~10 GB of disk space (~300 GB if you want the Bitcoin transaction index, makes for a faster LND)
3. Windows 7+ or macOS 10.12.6+

Please submit a pull request if you want to add Linux support! Next year is the Year of Desktop Linux...

Install

Download and open the latest release for your operating system: https://github.com/PierreRochard/node-launcher/releases

Node Launcher

1. Creates a node launcher data directory
   • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Node Launcher/
   • Windows: %localappdata%/Node\ Launcher/
2. Finds available ports for Bitcoin and LND, testnet and mainnet
3. When launched, Bitcoin nodes use the datadir directory specified in bitcoin.conf (or the default data directory)
4. If you don't have >300 GB of disk space free, Bitcoin nodes will fall back to pruned
5. Pruning still requires downloading data, so make sure you can handle downloading ~300 GB of data

Development

0. git clone https://github.com/PierreRochard/node-launcher && cd node-launcher
1. Setup a Python 3.7+ virtual environment
2. pip install -r requirements.txt
3. python setup.py develop
4. python run.py

Testing

pytest tests

To include tests with network calls to GitHub: pytest tests --run_slow

Packaging

macOS: pyinstaller run-mac.spec

Windows: pyinstaller run-windows.spec (pyinstaller packaging only works on Windows 7)

Generate LND Bindings

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/grpc/python.md