Plugins for c-lightning

Community curated plugins for c-lightning.

Available plugins

Name	Short description
autopilot	An autopilot that suggests channels that should be established
autoreload	A developer plugin that reloads a plugin under development when it changes
csvexportpays	A plugin that exports all payments to a CSV file
donations	A simple donations page to accept donations from the web
[drain][drain]	Draining, filling and balancing channels with automatic chunks.
graphql	Exposes the c-lightning API over graphql
lightning-qt	A bitcoin-qt-like GUI for lightningd
monitor	helps you analyze the health of your peers and channels
persistent-channels	Maintains a number of channels to peers
probe	Regularly probes the network for stability
prometheus	Lightning node exporter for the prometheus timeseries server
pruning	This plugin manages pruning of bitcoind such that it can always sync
rebalance	Keeps your channels balanced
reckless	An experimental plugin manager (search/install plugins)
sauron	A Bitcoin backend relying on Esplora's API
sendinvoiceless	Sends some money without an invoice from the receiving node.
sitzprobe	A Lightning Network payment rehearsal utility
summary	Print a nice summary of the node status
zmq	Publishes notifications via ZeroMQ to configured endpoints

Installation

To install and activate a plugin you need to stop your lightningd and restart it with the plugin argument like this:

lightningd --plugin=/path/to/plugin/directory/plugin_file_name.py

Notes:

• The plugin_file_name.py must have executable permissions: chmod a+x plugin_file_name.py
• A plugin can be written in any programming language, as it interacts with lightningd purely using stdin/stdout pipes.

Automatic plugin initialization

Alternatively, especially when you use multiple plugins, you can copy or symlink all plugin directories into your ~/.lightning/plugins directory. The daemon will load each executeable it finds in sub-directories as a plugin. In this case you don't need to manage all the --plugin=... parameters.

PYTHONPATH and pyln

To simplify plugin development you can rely on pyln-client for the plugin implementation, pyln-proto if you need to parse or write lightning protocol messages, and pyln-testing in order to write tests. These libraries can be retrieved in a number of different ways:

• Using pip tools: pip3 install pyln-client pyln-testing
• Using the PYTHONPATH environment variable to include your clightning's shipped pyln-* libraries:

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/lightnind/contrib/pyln-client:/path/to/lightnind/contrib/pyln-testing:$PYTHONPATH

Writing tests

The pyln-testing library provides a number of helpers and fixtures to write tests. While not strictly necessary, writing a test will ensure that your plugin is working correctly against a number of configurations (both with and without DEVELOPER, COMPAT and EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES), and more importantly that they will continue to work with newly release versions of c-lightning.

Writing a test is as simple as this:

• The framework will look for unittest filenames starting with test_.
• The test functions should also start with test_.

from pyln.testing.fixtures import *

pluginopt = {'plugin': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "YOUR_PLUGIN.py")}

def test_your_plugin(node_factory, bitcoind):
    l1 = node_factory.get_node(options=pluginopt)
    s = l1.rpc.summary()
    s = l1.rpc.getinfo()
    assert(s['network'] == 'REGTEST')  # or whatever you want to test

Tests are run against pull requests, all commits on master, as well as once ever 24 hours to test against the latest master branch of the c-lightning development tree.

Running tests locally can be done like this: (make sure the PYTHONPATH env variable is correct)

pytest YOUR_PLUGIN/YOUR_TEST.py

Additional dependencies

Additionally, some Python plugins come with a requirements.txt which can be used to install the plugin's dependencies using the pip tools:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Note: You might need to also specify the --user command line flag depending on your environment.

More Plugins from the Community

• @conscott's plugins
• @renepickhardt's plugins
• @fiatjaf's plugins
• @rsbondi's plugins
• c-lightning plugins emulating commands of LND (lncli)

Plugin Builder Resources

• Description of the plugin API
• C Plugin API by @rustyrussell
• Python Plugin API & RPC Client (PyPI) by @cdecker and a video tutorial by @renepickhardt
• Go Plugin API & RPC Client by @niftynei
• C++ Plugin API & RPC Client by @darosior
• Javascript Plugin API & RPC Client by @darosior