agent

Agent

Agent is a piece of software that is able to run on lightning node (we provide raspberry builds too) and report various data from it.

Contents:

Currently we have:

balance-agent

utility to monitor channel balances

The usage should be pretty self expanatory:

NAME:
   balance-agent - Utility to monitor channel balances

USAGE:
   balance-agent [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

VERSION:
   v0.0.3

COMMANDS:
     help, h  Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --apikey value             api key
   --rpcserver value          host:port of ln daemon (default: "localhost:10009")
   --lnddir value             path to lnd's base directory (default: "/home/user/lnd")
   --tlscertpath value        path to TLS certificate (default: "/home/user/lnd/tls.cert")
   --chain value, -c value    the chain lnd is running on e.g. bitcoin (default: "bitcoin")
   --network value, -n value  the network lnd is running on e.g. mainnet, testnet, etc. (default: "mainnet")
   --macaroonpath value       path to macaroon file
   --allowedentropy value     allowed entropy in bits for channel balances (default: 64)
   --interval value           interval to poll - 10s, 1m or 1h (default: "10s")
   --private                  report private channels as well
   --help, -h                 show help
   --version, -v              print the version

It tries the best to have sane defaults so you can just start it up on your node without further hassle. If you have a strange lnd dir (/storage in the example) you might need:

./balance-agent --lnddir /storage/lnd/ --tlscertpath /storage/lnd/data/secrets/lnd.cert

but that should be it.

Only thing that is mandatory is apikey which can also be provided through API_KEY environment variable.

By default it will try to communicate with LND using local gRPC connection and readonly.macaroon.

You can use --userest to start using REST API (default is as mentioned gRPC) - in that case --rpcserver can be complete URL to the endpoint.

Of course you can also start the agent on a remote node and just point it to the correct endpoint, but since this is not the default use cases flags --userest and --rpcserver are not advertied in help.

Internally we use:

• channelchecker: an abstraction for checking all channels
• lightning_api: an abstraction around lightning node API (that furthermore heavily depends on common code from lnd)

Dependencies

Currently the dependencies are still in private git repositories so you need to do something like:

go env -w GOPRIVATE=github.com/bolt-observer/go_common
git config url."git@github.com:".insteadOf "https://github.com/"

Verifying the Release

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bolt-observer/agent/main/scripts/keys/fiksn.asc | gpg --import
gpg --verify manifest-v0.0.3.txt.asc manifest-v0.0.3.txt

and you should see:

gpg:                using RSA key F4B8B3B59C1E5AA39A1B9636E897355718E1DBF4
gpg: Good signature from "Gregor Pogacnik <gregor@bolt.observer>" [ultimate]

Troubleshooting

Do:

go get -v github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd@v0.15.0-beta

or else you get an ancient version and everything breaks (should be good due to go.mod/sums now).