Install lightning on Raspberry Pi

This time I went and tried c-lightning instead of lnd. Let’s see how it goes.

After successfully running Bitcoin using the below tutorial

Run a full Bitcoin node on Raspberry Pi from scratch

It is time to download Core Lightning binaries from the official repo, at the time of this writing the below was the latest.

cd onto the directory you want to download and run the following commands

$ https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/releases/download/v23.08/clightning-v23.08.zip
$ wget -O SHA256SUMS.cln https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/releases/download/v23.08/SHA256SUMS

Verify with the following command

$ sha256sum --ignore-missing --check SHA256SUMS.cln
# clightning-v23.08.zip: OK

uncompress with

$ unzip clightning-v23.08.zip

You got the source, but before you start building, let’s start installing some dependencies:

sudo apt install autoconf automake build-essential git libtool libsqlite3-dev python3 python3-pip net-tools zlib1g-dev libsodium-dev gettext --yes

Now install some Python dependencies

pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install --user poetry
pip3 install --user grpcio-tools

Install rust dependencies to build the rust plugins

$ sudo apt install protobuf-compiler --yes

# download and install rust
$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# load onto $PATH
$ source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

Now let CD into the clightning source code

$ cd clightning-v23.08

Let’s get building!

$ pip3 install mako
$ pip3 install -r plugins/clnrest/requirements.txt
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

And you now have built c-lightning on your Raspberry Pi 🎉

Create a non-root user for running lightning

Create a new user called lightning following these steps and add it to the debian-tor group

$ sudo usermod -a -G debian-tor lightning

Create a directory outside the SDCard to lower the activity on the SDCard for the lightning data dir

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/sda/lightning
$ sudo chown lightning:lightning /mnt/sda/lightning
$ sudo ln -s /mnt/sda/lightning /home/lightning/.lightning
$ sudo chown -R lightning:lightning /home/lightning/.lightning

Switch to the lightning user

$ sudo -su lightning
$ cd ~

Download the sample lightning config file, and open it

$ wget -O ~/.lightning/config https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ElementsProject/lightning/master/contrib/config-example
$ vi .lightning/config

Edit the following lines

## Give your node a name
alias=YOUR_ALIAS

## Pick your favorite color as a hex code
rgb=FFA500

## Set the network for Core Lightning to sync to, Bitcoin Mainnet for most users
## Not required if the config file is in a network directory
network=bitcoin

## Log output to specified file instead of the terminal
## Required for `daemon`
log-file=/home/lightning/.lightning/log

## Set to debug for more verbose log output
#log-level=info

## Run `lightningd` as a background daemon instead of in the terminal
## Requires `log-file` path
daemon

# Set JSON-RPC socket (or /dev/tty), such as for lightning-cli(1).
rpc-file=/home/lightning/.lightning/lightning-rpc

# Set JSON-RPC socket file mode, as a 4-digit octal number.
# Default is 0600, meaning only the user that launched lightningd
# can command it.
# Set to 0660 to allow users with the same group to access the RPC
# as well.
rpc-file-mode=0666

## Bind Core Lightning RPC server to localhost PORT 9734
bind-addr=127.0.0.1:9734

## Configure proxy/tor for OUTBOUND connections.
proxy=127.0.0.1:9050

## INBOUND connections - default PORT 9735
## 0.0.0.0 for clearnet | localhost+torhiddenservice for tor
addr=statictor:127.0.0.1:9051

## Force all outbound connections through the proxy/tor
always-use-proxy=true

## Load your plugins from a directory
plugin-dir=/home/lightning/.lightning/plugins

Because my drive isn’t encrypted, I enabled encryption by adding encrypted-hsm to the config file

## Password encrypt your `hsm_secret`
## You must supply the password on startup if you choose to do this
encrypted-hsm

run lightning

$ lightningd

If you added encrypted-hsm, it will ask for a password and then it will be sent to the background.

Read the logs to make sure everything looks good with the following command:

$ tail -f ~/.lightning/log

You can also get the public onion address and the public key from the log, or by running lightning-cli getinfo.

Backup the hsm_secret file to recover on-chain funds, and the lightningd.sqlite3 file to recover channel funds by reading the official site recommendations, if you have any questions feel free to ask.

Things that I did:

• Use two USB drives to store the sqlite database in realtime using wallet=sqlite3:///path/to/lightningd.sqlite3:/path/to/backup/lightningd.sqlite3 in ~/.lightning/config
• Create a new hsm_secret from a backed-up Bip39 mnemonic code

Install RTL as a front-end to manage your lightning node, on-chain operations, and the lightning channels

Ride The Lightning

And that’s it, happy bitcoining!

References

• ElementsProject’s lightning
• Install c-lightning from source
• Install Rust
• Config example
• tor setup
• Backup and Recovery