User Guides

1. Please start here!
2. Send a payment with the Joule Chrome extension

Requirements

1. ~300 GB of download bandwidth
2. ~10 GB of disk space (~300 GB if you want the Bitcoin transaction index, makes for a faster LND)
3. Windows 7+ or macOS 10.12.6+

Linux works but it is not packaged, follow the developer steps below to run it from the Linux command line.

Please submit a pull request if you want to add Linux packaging! A .deb and .rpm would help grow the Lightning network...

Install

Download and open the latest release for your operating system: https://github.com/PierreRochard/node-launcher/releases

Node Launcher

1. Creates a node launcher data directory
   • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Node Launcher/
   • Windows: %localappdata%/Node\ Launcher/
2. Finds available ports for Bitcoin and LND, testnet and mainnet
3. When launched, Bitcoin nodes use the datadir directory specified in bitcoin.conf (or the default data directory)
4. If you don't have >300 GB of disk space free, Bitcoin nodes will fall back to pruned
5. Pruning still requires downloading data, so make sure you can handle downloading ~300 GB of data

Development

Review the contributing.md file https://github.com/PierreRochard/node-launcher/blob/master/contributing.md

Install Python3.7+

macOS: brew install python3 dbus dbus-glib

Linux: sudo apt install python3.7-venv libdbus-glib-1-dev python3.7-dev

For Windows see https://medium.com/@pierre_rochard/node-launcher-developer-setup-on-windows-5ba6e0fbb38a

For macOS and Linux:

0. git clone https://github.com/PierreRochard/node-launcher
1. cd node-launcher
2. python3.7 -m venv venv
3. . venv/bin/activate
4. pip3.7 install -r requirements.txt
5. python setup.py develop
6. python run.py

Testing

pytest tests

To include tests with network calls to GitHub: pytest tests --run_slow

Packaging

macOS: pyinstaller run-mac.spec

Windows: pyinstaller run-windows.spec (pyinstaller packaging only works on Windows 7)

Generate LND Bindings

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/grpc/python.md