Interacting with your Core Lightning Node

January 19, 2024 / farscapian

Interacting with your Core Lightning Node

Ok, you have a Rune and Node info and you've tested a CURL statement against the REST interface. Excellent!

But using curl statements are a little cumbersome. Maybe we can do better?

What if you want to interact with your node using a lightning-cli -like interface? You're in luck! We wrote a bash script that translates your CLI requests into the corresponding curl statements. The result? An interactive terminal-like experience, all against your node's REST interface.

💡

You MUST use the -k option on lightning-cli. We need key/value pairs so we can construct a JSON payload.

Clone the Repo

This tool makes development much simpler since you can interact with your lightning node like you're at the terminal. To use this script, clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/farscapian/lightning-cli-rest.git

Go look at the lightning-cli file. It's just a simple bash script that parses your lightning-cli commands and translates them into associated CURL statements which are executed against your CLN node's REST interface.

Execute a command against your CLN Node

Next, you can use the tool to make lightning-cli commands. For example:

./lightning-cli invoice -k amount_msat=100000 description="test" label="test1"

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If it's the first time runninglightning-cli, a .env will get stubbed out. Go put your rune and REST endpoint in there to continue!

Ok great! Make sure the command is returning valid responses before continuing. For example:

./lighting-cli getinfo should yield something like:

{
  "id": "0248820db560a5823949bf47af207e84f51a48a5d96288b338bc31c60a9b4efb4d",
  "alias": "Alice",
  "color": "ffffff",
  "num_peers": 0,
  "num_pending_channels": 0,
  "num_active_channels": 0,
  "num_inactive_channels": 0,
  "address": [
    {
      "type": "dns",
      "address": "cln-0",
      "port": 9735
    }
  ],
  "binding": [
    {
      "type": "ipv4",
      "address": "0.0.0.0",
      "port": 9735
    }
  ],
  "version": "v23.11.2",
  "blockheight": 14873,
  "network": "regtest",
  "fees_collected_msat": 0,
  "lightning-dir": "/root/.lightning/regtest",
  "our_features": {
    "init": "08a0800a0a69a2",
    "node": "88a0800a0a69a2",
    "channel": "",
    "invoice": "02000002024100"
  }
}

Summary

At this point, you have a lightning-cli you can use to interact with your node. Your nodes come pre-installed with a bunch of RPC methods already. But, if you want to add functionality to your Core Lightning node, you'll need to know about plugin development.