CLBOSS The C-Lightning Node Manager

CLBOSS is an automated manager for C-Lightning forwarding nodes.

CLBOSS is effectively a bunch of heuristics modules wired together to a regular clock to continuously monitor your node.

Its design goal is to make it so that running a Lightning Network node is as simple as installing C-Lightning and CLBOSS, putting some amount of funds of 0.1BTC or more, and making sure you have continuous Internet and power to the hardware running it.

Current versions of CLBOSS might not achieve this goal yet perfectly, but hopefully with enough effort and iteration and raw coding and etc etc it will someday be as unusual to manually manage a Lightning node as writing (as opposed to reading) machine language is unusual today.

I hope CLBOSS can make the transition from pre-Lightning to post-Lightning much smoother in practice.

Dependencies

If you are installing from some official source release tarball, you only need the below packages installed on a Debian or Debian-derived systems:

• build-essential
• pkg-config
• libev-dev
• libcurl4-gnutls-dev
• libsqlite3-dev

Equivalent packages have a good probability of existing in non-Debian-derived distributions as well.

The following dependency is technically optional, but is strongly recommended (CLBOSS will check it at runtime so you do not need it while building):

• dnsutils

If you have to build directly from github.com, you need the below Debian packages in addition:

• git
• automake
• autoconf-archive

A design goal of CLBOSS is to reduce the above dependencies even further.

Installing

From an official source release, just:

./configure && make
sudo make install # or su first, then make install

This will install clboss as a standard executable, usually in /usr/local/bin/ by default. You will then need to modify your lightning.conf to add the path to which clboss as a plugin or important-plugin of lightningd.

From a git clone, you first need to execute:

autoreconf -i

Then run the ./configure && make && sudo make install.