Balance of Satoshis

Commands for working with LND balances.

Install

• Requires an installation of Node v10.12.0+
• Have a RaspiBlitz? Check out this install guide

If you want to try out any command without npm install, you can also do npx balanceofsatoshis to run a command directly.

If you have Docker installed, you can run through Docker instead.

npm install -g balanceofsatoshis

Verify it's installed:

bos --version
# current installed version

Usage

To see a list of available options and flags run:

bos help

# Or get individual help with a command
bos help commandName

Or ask about commands on Telegram

Example Commands

# See an accounting formatted list of various types of transactions
bos accounting "category"

# See total balance, including pending funds, excluding future commit fees
bos balance

# Get the number of days the node cert remains valid
bos cert-validity-days

# Receive on-chain funds via a regular address
bos chain-deposit

# Receive funds via swap on-chain
bos chain-receive "amount"

# See the current fee estimates confirmation targets
bos chainfees

# Show chain fees paid
bos chart-chain-fees

# Show routing fees earned
bos chart-fees-earned

# Show routing fees paid
bos chart-fees-paid

# Show a chart of payments received
bos chart-payments-received

# See details on how closed channels resolved on-chain
bos closed

# Export credentials
bos credentials

# Create a utxo fan-out with on-chain funds
bos fanout "amount" "count"

# View outbound fee rates and update outbound fee rates to peers
bos fees

# Query the node to find something like a payment, channel or node
bos find "query"

# Output a summarized version of peers forwarded towards
bos forwards

# Create a signed raw transaction for an on-chain transfer
bos fund "address" "amount"

# See help about a command
bos help "command"

# Run gateway service for https://ln-operator.github.io/ UI
bos gateway

# Output the sum total of remote channel liquidity
bos inbound-liquidity

# Enforce rules on inbound channels
bos inbound-channel-rules

# Increase inbound liquidity to the node
bos increase-inbound-liquidity

# Increase the outbound liquidity of the node
bos increase-outbound-liquidity

# View and adjust list of saved nodes
bos nodes

# Open channels to public keys using external funding
bos open "public_keys..."

# Outputs the sum total of local channel liquidity
bos outbound-liquidity

# Pay a payment request, probing first
bos pay "payment_request"

# Show channel-connected peers
bos peers

# Output the price of BTC
bos price

# Test if funds can be sent to a destination
bos probe "payment_request/public_key"

# Make a ping keysend-request to a node
bos purchase-ping "public_key"

# Rebalance funds between peers
bos rebalance

# Remove all channels with a peer
bos remove-peer

# Get a general report of the node activity
bos report

# Send funds and an optional message to a node
bos send

# Service keysend-requests
bos service-keysend-requests

# Connect up to a Telegram bot
bos telegram

# Unlock the wallet if it is locked
bos unlock "path_to_password_file"

# Show unspent coin outputs
bos utxos

HowTos:

• The accounting command howto
• The open command howto
• The rebalance command howto

Nodes

By default bos expects tls.cert in the root of the default lnd directory and admin.macaroon in <default_lnd_dir>/data/chain/bitcoin/<network>.

Default LND directories:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Lnd/
• Linux: ~/.lnd/

It will check first for a mainnet macaroon, then a testnet macaroon.

Saved Nodes

If you have another node and it is already using balanceofsatoshis, you can add it as a "saved node" using bos nodes --add.

Otherwise you can copy the credentials into a saved nodes directory:

To use bos with arbitrary external nodes (or nodes with custom configuration), two things need to be done:

1. Create directory ~/.bos/, and add node credentials in a format of:

   ~/.bos/YOUR_NODE_NAME/credentials.json

2. Each file should have the following format:

   {
     "cert": "base64 tls.cert value",
     "macaroon": "base64 .macaroon value",
     "socket": "host:ip"
   }
   

   Note: cert and (admin) macaroon should have base64-encoded, and newline-stripped content of the files. To get the strings in appropriate format you can run, ex:

   # For `cert` 
   base64 ~/.lnd/tls.cert | tr -d '\n'
   
   # For `macaroon`
   base64 ~/.lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet/admin.macaroon | tr -d '\n'
   

   Note_2: socket should contain host:ip pointing to lnd's gRPC interface, localhost:10009 by convention.

You can also set cert_path and macaroon_path to the path of the relevant files instead.

Using Saved Nodes

To run commands on nodes specified this way, you need to suffix commands with their name, ex:

bos balance --node=SAVED_NODE_NAME
bos forwards --node=SAVED_NODE_NAME

If a saved node is actually your default node, you can set an environment variable to avoid adding the --node prefix

export BOS_DEFAULT_SAVED_NODE=nodename

If that is set, it will use that node if no node is specified.

You can also add a JSON file to your .bos directory: config.json, add "default_saved_node": "nodename" to set the default via a file instead

Linux Fu

Some commands are designed to return outputs that can be piped or used in other CLI programs.

Summarize Numbers

expr $(bos balance --node=savedNode1) + $(bos balance --node=savedNode2)
# outputs the combined balance of both nodes

Auto Adjust Fees

# Cron every 5 minutes adjust fees
*/5 * * * * /bin/timeout -s 2 30 /home/ubuntu/update-fees.sh

update-fees.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# Raise the outbound fees to a public key when inbound increases
/home/ubuntu/.npm-global/bin/bos fees --to PUBLIC_KEY --set-fee-rate="IF(INBOUND>10000000,1000,500)"

Auto Balance Liquidity Between Two Nodes

Keep a channel balanced between two nodes

# Cron: every 30 minutes send funds to reach 50:50
*/30 * * * * /home/ubuntu/.npm-global/bin/bos send PUBKEY --max-fee 0 --message="rebalance" --amount="IF(OUTBOUND+1*m>(LIQUIDITY/2), OUTBOUND-(LIQUIDITY/2), 0)"

Alerts and Reports with sendnotification

Some commands are made with the idea that they can trigger an alert or regular report by piping the output of a command into some reporting script like sendnotification which works with AWS SNS service to deliver notifications

Examples of shell scripts that could be executed by crontab:

Cert Expiration Alert

# cert-expiration-alert.sh

#!/bin/bash
/path/to/bos cert-validity-days --below 30 | \
/path/to/sendnotification SNS "sns-topic-id" "Warning: %s days left on TLS cert" \
--nonzero --subject="Cert expiration warning"

# sends email when the certification has less than 30 days left until invalid

Daily Node Report

# daily-report.sh

#!/bin/bash
/path/to/bos report --styled 2>&1 | \
/path/to/sendnotification SNS "sns-topic-id" "%s" --subject="Daily node update"

# sends email about what has happened on the node in the past day

Low Channel Balance Alert

# low-offchain-outbound-liquidity alert

#!/bin/bash
/path/to/bos balance --offchain --below 4000000 | \
/path/to/sendnotification SNS "sns-topic-id" "off-chain balance deficit: %s sats" \
--nonzero --subject="Low balance warning"

# sends email if the channel balance goes below a threshold

Low Inbound Liquidity Alert

# low-inbound-liquidity.sh

#!/bin/bash
/path/to/bos inbound-liquidity --below=1000000 2>&1 | \
/path/to/sendnotification SNS "sns-topic-id" \
"WARNING inbound-liquidity deficit: %s sats" --nonzero \
--subject="Low inbound liquidity warning: node1"

# sends email if the inbound liquidity drops below a 1,000,000 sats

Docker

This presumes you have Docker installed.

• Instructions for installing Docker on Ubuntu

Docker Load

Install the Docker image:

docker pull alexbosworth/balanceofsatoshis

You can also build the image yourself: npm run build-docker, this will make balanceofsatoshis.tar.gz that you can rsync or scp somewhere else and then do docker load < balanceofsatoshis.tar.gz.

Once the image is installed, you can "docker run" commands for all the commands:

# Make sure you have a home directory created to give Docker access to
mkdir $HOME/.bos

docker run -it --rm -v $HOME/.bos:/home/node/.bos alexbosworth/balanceofsatoshis --version
# Should output the version

This maps your home directory to the docker home directory to enable persistence of credentials.

If you want it to automatically detect your local node, also pass the LND home dir as an additional -v argument to docker run:

If you are on MacOS:

--network="host" -v $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/Lnd/:/home/node/.lnd:ro

Or on Linux:

--network="host" -v $HOME/.lnd:/home/node/.lnd:ro

Otherwise you can just pass the local node credentials as shown above using the saved nodes.

Note: if you are used to using ctrl+c to terminate the process, that doesn't work on Docker. Instead, you can use ctrl+p and then ctrl+q to background the interactive mode, then do docker ps and docker rm to kill the instance.

Build Your Own

If you don't want to use the Dockerfile, you can build a docker file for yourself

FROM node:latest
RUN npm install balanceofsatoshis
ENTRYPOINT [ "/node_modules/balanceofsatoshis/bos" ]

Run Shell Script

If you don't want to type out "docker run", and don't have an alias for it, you can create a simple shell script to fill that part in:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
docker run -it --rm -v=$HOME/.bos:/root/.bos bos:latest ${@:1}

You can also define an alias for placing in ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile:

alias bos="docker run -it --rm -v $HOME/.bos:/home/node/.bos alexbosworth/balanceofsatoshis"

Adjust this alias to however you run the full Docker command. Remember to execute the ~/.profile to install the alias into your current session: . ~/.profile

You can also create an alias to run a command in the background

alias bosd="docker run -d --rm -v $HOME/.bos:/home/node/.bos alexbosworth/balanceofsatoshis"