c-lightning & Lightweight nodes (no local bitcoind)

2

I am trying to take advantage of the new release of c-lightning 0.6 that provide the ability to setup a lightweight node (i.e. No Local bitcoind instance running). But did not found any documentation how to do that yet.

What should I do in order to have a lightning node running a lightweight node? Is there a specific flag to use? or it is just a call from bitcoin-cli with a remote connexion flag setup on it?

Current setup:

  • Ubuntu 18.04 server
  • c-lightning 0.6

Hugo Doyon

Posted 2018-07-03T16:24:00.877

Reputation: 45

Answers

3

One lightweight alternative that I use quite often when setting up a Lightning node is spruned. The following will get you up and running:

Install some dependencies:

apt-get install -y git python3 \
                       libleveldb-dev \
                       python3-dev \
                       git \
                       gcc \
                       g++ \
                       python3-pip

Get spruned and its dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/gdassori/spruned.git spruned
cd spruned
git checkout 43e197693278fd551b165c6cfa5de78f853ef554 
pip install -r requirements.txt

The third line is currently needed since the master commit is currently broken.

Next you can start the lightweight node with the following:

python3 spruned.py --network bitcoin.mainnet --datadir data --debug --rpcuser=rpcuser --rpcpassword=rpcpassword

Once the node is running you can start c-lightning like this:

lightningd --log-level=debug --network=bitcoin \
           --bitcoin-rpcuser=rpcuser \
           --bitcoin-rpcpassword=rpcpassword

cdecker

Posted 2018-07-03T16:24:00.877

Reputation: 7 878

0

I'm the developer of the spruned Bitcoin client, thank you for posting that.

I always told that spruned is highly experimental. At the moment, however, I'm confident to advice the latest 0.0.5 release as stable enough to keep a c-lightning mainnet instance in sync.

The latest release on pypi includes an electrum based fee estimation quorum and a robust P2P connection pool with a 100% blocks hitrate.

Today, the bandwidth usage is still high and cannot be used on metered connections.

https://pypi.org/project/spruned/

Guido

Posted 2018-07-03T16:24:00.877

Reputation: 21