RTL/release-notes/Release-notes-0.15.9.md

Release Notes — 0.15.9

This document collects the changes that go into the 0.15.9 release. Each PR merged for this release should add its entry under the appropriate section below.

Bug Fixes

• All implementations: fix a page-load error when a channel's alias is undefined (#1581). On the home dashboard, channel labels were rendered as (channel.alias || channel.peer_id).length (and the remote_alias/shortChannelId variants). When both the alias and its fallback id were undefined, calling .length on undefined threw during change detection and errored the page on load. The bindings now fall back to an empty string (|| '', with optional chaining) so a missing alias can no longer break the page.

• Multi-node: fix stale auth options blocking a node whose credentials weren't ready at startup (#1601). CommonService.setOptions short-circuited on this.nodes[0] regardless of which node was being processed, so once the first node's auth headers loaded, every subsequent call returned early. A second node whose credential load had failed — e.g. a Core Lightning rune file written asynchronously after RTL starts — was never retried and kept failing with missing rune! until RTL was restarted. The cache check is now per-node, so a node that failed to initialize is retried on the next request once its credential is available, while already-loaded nodes are still skipped.

• Core Lightning: fix contradictory channel connection status between the list and the detail panel (#1625, fixes #1606). CLN's listpeerchannels reports connection state as peer_connected, but the open and pending channel-list columns read the legacy connected field, which the backend never populated. The list therefore always rendered "Disconnected" while the detail panel (which reads peer_connected) showed the true state. The backend now normalizes connected = peer_connected in the listPeerChannels response so legacy consumers stay in sync, and the list columns read peer_connected directly. Regression tests were added for both channel tables.

• Core Lightning: fix the channel View Info modal rendering blank for disconnected channels (#1625, fixes #1606). The channel information modal renders a block-explorer link from selNode.settings.blockExplorerUrl, but the pending/inactive channels table opened the modal without passing selNode. With it undefined, that binding threw during change detection and blanked every field below it — State, Connected, Private and the balances all showed no value. Because a disconnected channel moves to the pending/inactive table, this is exactly what was seen on "View Info" for a disconnected channel. The pending table now passes selNode (matching the open table), and the modal guards the explorer link so a missing selNode can no longer blank the dialog. The LND channel information modal had the same unguarded selNode.settings.blockExplorerUrl binding (reachable from the active-HTLCs and channel-backup tables, which open it without selNode), so the same guard was applied there for parity. Eclair's modal doesn't use selNode.settings, so it is unaffected.

• All implementations: restore the "items per page" dropdown (and first/last-page buttons) on paginated tables (#1626, fixes #1580). A dependency-update commit in the 0.15.8-beta cycle mechanically renamed the paginator binding [showFirstLastButtons] to [hidePageSize] on every mat-paginator while keeping the same screenSize === XS ? false : true expression. Because the two properties have opposite polarity, this inverted the behavior: on desktop the page-size selector was hidden, so users were locked to 10 items per page with no way to raise it — and the first/last-page buttons were dropped everywhere as collateral. Reverting the ~44 affected paginators back to [showFirstLastButtons] restores both behaviors across the LND, Core Lightning, Eclair and shared tables.

• Accessibility: add missing form-field labels and remove positive tab indexes (#1609, fixes #1566). Several mat-select and datepicker controls across the send, invoice, open/close-channel, bump-fee, public-key and settings forms were rendered without a mat-label, so screen readers had no way to announce their purpose (WCAG 1.3.1 / 3.3.2). Descriptive labels were added to the affected controls. The forms also relied on positive tabindex values, an anti-pattern (WCAG 2.4.3) that produced an inconsistent keyboard order; these were removed so focus follows natural DOM order across the LND, Core Lightning, Eclair and shared modals.

• Bound peer/route alias resolution to stop clnrest "Resource temporarily unavailable" errors (#1629, fixes #1501). RTL resolves peer aliases by calling listnodes (CLN) / graph/node (LND) once per peer. A prior fix bounded this to 20 concurrent calls (plus a cache) for the CLN channel list, but the Core Lightning peers list and route lookup — and the LND peers list — still fired an unbounded Promise.all, one request per peer at once. On Core Lightning nodes with many peers this overwhelms clnrest and fails with Resource temporarily unavailable (os error 11) (EAGAIN), leaving raw node IDs instead of aliases. All of these paths now use the same 20-way concurrency limit (Eclair already resolves aliases inline from a bulk nodes list, so it is unaffected). The CLN alias lookup was also made self-contained so aliases resolve regardless of which screen is opened first; the limiter now resolves immediately for an empty or non-positive input (which would previously never send a response); and the CLN alias cache gained a 6-hour TTL and a max size so aliases refresh without an RTL restart and the cache can't grow unbounded.

• Reports: realign the Scroll Range select with the date picker (#1637, fixes #1635). The a11y fix in #1609 wrapped the Reports page's bare Scroll Range mat-select in a mat-form-field so it could carry a label, but the new wrapper reserved Material's hint/subscript space below the input (78.8px total vs the date field's 56px) and was top-anchored, leaving the Monthly/Yearly Date picker sitting ~11px lower than the select on every implementation's report screens. The field now uses subscriptSizing="dynamic" (no hints are used, so no space is reserved) and centers on the cross axis, restoring the aligned 56px control row from v0.15.8 while keeping the accessibility label. Verified by measuring the rendered layout headlessly against the regtest fixture: both fields now render at identical top/height.

Enhancements

• Add a Disable Authentication option (#1582). A new disableAuth config flag (or DISABLE_AUTH environment variable) lets RTL run without its login screen — intended for node-platform vendors who put their own authentication layer in front of RTL, not for standalone users. When enabled, RTL issues a session token automatically and disables password updates and 2FA; a configured APP_PASSWORD is rejected as incompatible. Backend, frontend, and configuration docs were updated.

• LND: show "Blocks till Maturity" by default on the Pending Force Closing list (#1627, fixes #1567). Blocks-till-maturity is critical for a force-closing channel, but it was only visible in the per-channel detail modal. The column and its data binding already existed in the table (and was selectable via column settings); it was simply absent from the default column selection. Added blocks_til_maturity to the pending_force_closing defaults for both the desktop and mobile (SM) layouts, so it's surfaced on the list out of the box. Users who have already customized this page keep their saved columns and can add it via the column-settings gear.

Code Health

• LND: migrate sat_per_byte to sat_per_vbyte in node requests (#1592). LND's v0.21.0 release notes deprecate the sat_per_byte field, with removal planned in v0.22 across CloseChannel, OpenChannel, SendCoins, SendMany and walletrpc.BumpFee. LND already interprets the old field as sat/vbyte internally, so this is a pure wire-format rename with no value conversion. The close-channel, open-channel, send-coins and bump-fee request paths (and their matching TypeScript identifiers) now send sat_per_vbyte, keeping RTL compatible ahead of the removal.

• Batch dependency update resolving all 20 open Dependabot security PRs (#1633). Dependabot had 20 open security-alert PRs against master (#1583–#1617). Rather than merging them piecemeal (they conflict with each other on package-lock.json and target the wrong branch for the release flow), the same bumps were applied in one pass on the release branch: axios 1.16.0 and ws 8.21.0 (direct), the socket.io server stack (engine.io, engine.io-client, socket.io-adapter, socket.io-parser), express's path-to-regexp, follow-redirects, lodash, and the rest of the flagged transitive deps; the Angular framework packages moved in lockstep to 20.3.26 and the CLI/build toolchain to 20.3.32 (which drops the vulnerable node-forge from the tree entirely). In-range fixes Dependabot hadn't re-opened PRs for (pdfmake 0.3.11 for its SSRF advisory, qs, uuid, tough-cookie, cookie, ajv, bn.js, elliptic) were picked up in the same pass. npm audit goes from 85 vulnerabilities (23 production) to 29 (13 production, none high or critical besides the request stack); everything remaining requires code changes, not version bumps — the deprecated request/request-promise stack, csurf and the crypto-browserify polyfill chain — and is tracked separately. Verified with a clean lint, the full frontend test suite, both production builds, and an end-to-end smoke test of the docker regtest fixture across LND, Core Lightning and Eclair (auth, getinfo, channel lists, and the WebSocket upgrade path).

• Replace the deprecated request/request-promise HTTP stack with axios (#TBD, part of #1634). request has been deprecated and unmaintained since 2020 and carries an unfixable SSRF advisory plus vulnerable pinned copies of form-data (critical), qs, tough-cookie and uuid — 8 of the 13 production npm audit findings left after #1633, none fixable by a version bump. All 36 backend files that imported request-promise (the LND, Core Lightning and Eclair controllers, Boltz/Loop/RTLConf shared controllers, common.ts and the LND websocket client) now go through a small compatibility wrapper (server/utils/request.ts) backed by axios — already a production dependency, so nothing new is added. The wrapper accepts the existing request-promise options (qs, form including pre-encoded string bodies, body, baseUrl/uri, rejectUnauthorized, json), resolves with the response body directly, and rejects with a plain object mirroring request-promise's StatusCodeError/RequestError shape, so CommonService.handleError's status-code and message extraction (including the ECONNREFUSED → 503 mapping and Eclair's status-code special case) behaves as before; auth headers are omitted from rejected errors so they cannot leak into logs. Callers without json: true still receive the raw text body, and LND's line-delimited /v2/router/send stream still surfaces as a string for the existing parser. Production npm audit drops from 13 findings (2 critical) to 6 low, all in the crypto-browserify/elliptic polyfill chain tracked in #1634. Verified end-to-end against the docker regtest fixture: 43 API checks across all three implementations (reads, invoice creation, a routed LND payment over the streaming endpoint, cross-implementation payments from Core Lightning and Eclair, message sign/verify, channel backup to disk, bad-invoice and node-unreachable error mapping) plus a clean lint and both production builds.

• Rebuild the compiled CLN channels controller to match its source (#1631). The #1606 fix updated server/controllers/cln/channels.ts to mirror peer_connected onto the legacy connected field, but the committed compiled artifact backend/controllers/cln/channels.js was never regenerated, so it lagged its source. Rebuilt it so the committed backend output includes the connected-mirror line.

Developer Tooling

• Documented the Dependabot / dependency-update process in CONTRIBUTING.md (#1636). Dependabot's security PRs target master and are never merged individually — they are resolved in batch dependency-update PRs against the current release branch (as done in #1633). That process was previously undocumented. CONTRIBUTING.md now has a "Handling Dependabot PRs" section covering the full flow: collecting targets (including in-range fixes hidden by exact pins), applying bumps with Angular in lockstep, regenerating the lockfile from scratch, rebuilding and committing the compiled artifacts, verification, and tracking deprecated packages that need code-level replacement in dedicated issues.

• Rebuilt the regtest docker fixture (#1621). The docker/ dev setup had been unable to start since February 2021 — a broken boltz service (undeclared BOLTZ_* variables, a non-existent build context, and undeclared volumes) made Compose reject the whole project, so even docker compose up -d bitcoind failed. It was replaced with a working regtest network: bitcoind 30.0 + three LND 0.20.0-beta nodes (alice → bob → carol, so RTL's routing/forwarding screens have data) + RTL, all using Polar's multi-arch images (nothing built locally; works on arm64), plus a deterministic seed.sh. The Core Lightning node below was later added on top of this fixture.

• Added a Core Lightning node to the regtest docker fixture (#1625). The docker/ fixture now runs a cln node (official elementsproject/lightningd image) alongside the three LND nodes, wired to RTL over clnrest with rune auth, and the seed opens a cln→alice channel. This gives RTL's Core Lightning screens a real backend for local development and testing — it was used to verify the CLN channel-connection fix above end-to-end. See docker/README.md.

• Added an Eclair node to the regtest docker fixture (#1632). The docker/ fixture now runs an eclair node alongside the LND and Core Lightning nodes, completing backend coverage of all three implementations RTL supports. RTL talks to its HTTP API with basic auth (lnApiPassword), and the seed opens an eclair→bob channel plus payments and an open invoice so RTL's Eclair screens have data. Polar's multi-arch polarlightning/eclair image is used because the official acinq/eclair image is amd64-only and its versioned tags are years stale. Since Eclair drives a bitcoind wallet rather than its own, an init container creates a dedicated eclair wallet before the node starts — otherwise it would attach to the fixture's mining wallet. A bin/e-cli helper wraps eclair-cli.