jb55 / lnsocket

A minimal C & js library for sending messages to lightning nodes

lnsocket

A simple C, JS and Go library for sending messages over the lightning network.

Thanks to Rusty and the clightning project for much of this code, I have adapted it to be more library friendly.

Motivation

I wanted a way to send custom messages to my lightning node, such as RPC. Building this as a simple C library will allow you to speak the lightning network in native applications, like on mobile.

Dependencies

You'll need libtool, autoconf, and automake for the libsodium & secp256k1 submodules, but otherwise there are no dependencies.

You'll need emscripten for the wasm build.

Building

$ make

iOS

$ make ios

This will build lnsocket.a, libsodium.a and libsecp256k1.a under target/ios for arm64 and ios-sim-x86.

WASM/JS/Web

Building manually:

$ make js

This will build lnsocket.js and lnsocket.wasm in target/js so that you can connect to the lightning network from your browser via websockets.

There are packaged versions of the js build under dist/js

If you are in a web environment that supports npm modules, you can import lnsocket using npm:

const LNSocket = require('lnsocket')

async function makeRequest(method, params, rune) {
  const ln = await LNSocket()
  ln.genkey()
  await ln.connect_and_init(node_id, host)
  // ... etc
}

The plain js file under dist/js declares an lnsocket_init() function like so:

const LNSocket = await lnsocket_init()
const ln = LNSocket()

ln.genkey()

See examples/websockets.js for a demo.

NodeJS

$ npm install --save lnsocket

See examples/node.js

Go

There is a Go version of lnsocket written using lnd's brontide¹.

You can import it via:

import "github.com/jb55/lnsocket/go"

It is currently used in fiatjaf's makeinvoice go library² if you want an example of its usage.

Rust

There are some initial rust bindings which you can build via: make rust

C Examples

• See test.c for a ping/pong example

• See lnrpc.c for an RPC example

Contributing

Send patches to [e-mail]

$ git config format.subjectPrefix 'PATCH lnsocket'
$ git config sendemail.to 'William Casarin <[e-mail]>'
$ git send-email --annotate HEAD^

See git-send-email.io³ for configuring your mailer

You can open a PR on github⁴ as well

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/tree/master/brontide ↩

2. https://github.com/fiatjaf/makeinvoice/blob/d523b35084af04883f94323dc11a50c2a99d253d/makeinvoice.go#L366 ↩

3. https://git-send-email.io/ ↩

4. https://github.com/jb55/lnsocket ↩