c-lightning Project Template (Updated for Bitcoin 24 and Default CI)

Getting started with a new project can be a daunting task, especially on a complex project like a Lightning node. This template tries to get you going as fast as possible, by providing a couple of utilities and a preconfigured environment. The environment consists of a fully fledged python project including tests, so you can start on your implementation without having to learn all the obscure incantations first.

Who is this template for?

Everybody! While primarily created to get a number of academic projects going, it provides an easy to extend base that can be built upon:

• Researchers trying to investigate the Lightning Network can create controlled network setups that highlight the aspects that they are looking into.
• Plugin developers that want to extend c-lightning have a template of a plugin that can be incrementally changed to add new cool features.
• Application developer that need a working test network they can use to test their applications against.

Getting Started

Out of the box this template provides a number of pieces that should get you started right away:

• A sample plugin in src/plugin.py that shows you how easy it is to write a plugin to extend the existing functionality in c-lightning
• Some tests that show how a network can be bootstrapped, and each node can be configured, with or without plugins.
• A docker image that contains the required dependencies, so you can test and develop in isolation.
• A Makefile that provides shortcuts to run tests and build artifacts.

You can get started with this template by checking it out, and start hacking:

$ git clone https://github.com/lightningd/template.git my-awesome-project
$ cd my-awesome-project

Alternatively you can also download a snapshot and start with that:

$ wget https://github.com/lightningd/template/archive/master.zip -O my-awesome-project.zip
$ unzip my-awesome-project.zip
$ cd my-awesome-project

The template comes with some canned tests to illustrate how you can create a network, perform some actions on it, test some things, and then tear down the network again after the test ran. These tests can be run either directly, or with the provided docker image, if you don't want to install the dependencies. The following builds the docker image:

make docker-image

And the following runs the tests in a docker container:

make docker-test

Where to go next?

Once you have familiarized yourself with how your tests can be run it's time to dig deeper. The following resources should help you on your journey:

• The c-lightning Plugin API docs describe the communication between c-lightning and your plugin.
• The pyln-client docs describe the JSON-RPC API client (LightningRpc) and the Plugin API used to talk to c-lightning over the JSON-RPC or to implement a plugin. 🚧 These docs are still under construction 🚧