Agent

Bolt-agent is a tool for workflow based node management automation through bolt.observer platform.

Contents:

bolt-agent

utility to monitor and manage lightning node

The usage should be pretty self explanatory:

NAME:
   bolt-agent - Utility to monitor and manage lightning node

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

VERSION:
   v0.2.2

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

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --allowedentropy value      allowed entropy in bits for channel balances (default: 64)
   --apikey value              api key
   --channel-whitelist value   path to file containing a whitelist of channels
   --interval value            interval to poll - 10s, 1m, 10m or 1h (default: "10s")
   --lnddir value              path to lnd's base directory (default: "/home/user/.lnd")
   --macaroonpath value        path to macaroon file
   --private                   report private data as well (default: false)
   --preferipv4                if you have the choice between IPv6 and IPv4 prefer IPv4 (default: false)
   --rpcserver value           host:port of ln daemon (default: "localhost:10009")
   --tlscertpath value         path to TLS certificate (default: "/home/user/.lnd/tls.cert")
   --channel-whitelist value   path to file containing a whitelist of channels
   --verbosity value           log level for V logs (default: 0)
   --help, -h                  show help
   --version, -v               print the version

ADVANCED OPTIONS:
   --datastore-url             datastore URL (default: agent-api.bolt.observer:443)
   --ignorecln                 ignore CLN socket (default: false)
   --keepalive value           keepalive interval (if nothing changed after this time an empty message will be sent) (default: "60s")
   --public value              used together with --channel-whitelist (default: false)
   --url value                 report url (default: "https://ingress.bolt.observer/api/node-data-report/")
   --userest                   use REST API when true instead of gRPC (default: false)
   --fetch-invoices            fetch invoices (default: 0)
   --fetch-forwards            fetch forwards (default: 0)
   --fetch-payments            fetch payments (default: 0)
   --noplugins                 disable plugins (default: false)

GLOG OPTIONS (described in https://github.com/google/glog#setting-flags):
   --verbosity (instead of -v)
   --logtostderr
   --stderrthreshold
   --alsologtostderr
   --vmodule
   --log_dir
   --log_backtrace_at

Agent works with LND and CoreLightning and tries the best to have sane defaults so you can just start it up on your node without further hassle.

Example:

bolt-agent --apikey key

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

export API_KEY=changeme
bolt-agent

Agent is using glog library for logging which needs writable /tmp (use --logtostderr to prevent writing to filesystem).

Flag --private means whether you want to report data for private ("unannounced") channels too (when true). The default is false. There is an advanced option of filtering what channels exactly are reported documented in "Filtering on agent side" section.

For more information about what exactly is reported read DATA.md.

Advanced options

If you have a custom LND directory (/storage in the example) you might need:

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

but that should be it.

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 - in that case --rpcserver can be complete URL to the endpoint.

bolt-agent --userest --rpcserver https://bolt.observer/endpoint

For CoreLightning it will use UNIX domain socket. By default agent will try to use ~/.lightning/bitcoin/lightning-rpc. If that file exists program will default to CoreLightning so if have LND installed on the node too and do not want to use CLN there is a flag --ignorecln. You can manually override name of UNIX domain socket using --rpcserver flag. Example:

bolt-agent --rpcserver /storage/cln/socket

Make sure agent is running with correct permissions to access the socket.

There is support for remote connections via commando plugin but you cannot use that option via command-line flags at the moment. We suggest to use socat utility if you wish to monitor a remote CLN node.

Install

We provide a standalone statically compiled binary. The targets are linux (amd64 build for GNU/Linux), rasp (aarch64 build for GNU/Linux) suitable for installation on your Raspberry PI and darwin (amd64 build for MacOS). If you need some different architecture that is no problem except that you will have to build the binaries yourself (so you will need to install Golang). You can also open an issue / pull request to extend the defaults (or provide better naming).

Script

You can run:

curl https://bolt.observer/agent | sh

to install the latest version of agent.

The executed script is present here so you can first check what it does. Or you can also do a manual installation.

Nix

If you have Nix with flake support you can do:

nix profile install 'github:bolt-observer/agent'

Manual installation steps

Script will execute same steps that you can invoke manually:

• fetch latest revision from https://github.com/bolt-observer/agent/releases

wget https://github.com/bolt-observer/agent/releases/download/v0.2.2/bolt-agent-v0.2.2-linux.zip https://github.com/bolt-observer/agent/releases/download/v0.2.2/manifest-v0.2.2.txt.asc https://github.com/bolt-observer/agent/releases/download/v0.2.2/manifest-v0.2.2.txt

• verify integrity

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bolt-observer/agent/main/scripts/keys/developers.asc | gpg --import
gpg --verify manifest-v0.2.2.txt.asc manifest-v0.2.2.txt

and you should see:

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

or

gpg:                using RSA key 04AC8A162C036B650A271A6360886AC6567069C5
gpg: Good signature from "bolt <tomaz@bolt.observer>" [ultimate]

• unpack the compressed binary

unzip bolt-agent-v0.2.2-linux.zip

• copy the binary to a common place

cp bolt-agent-v0.2.2-linux /usr/local/bin/bolt-agent

• start the binary

bolt-agent -apikey changeme

• you may want to run the agent as a systemd service (we have a simple systemd template here)

You need to do that only once:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bolt-observer/agent/main/bolt-agent.service
cp bolt-agent.service /etc/systemd/system/bolt-agent.service
$EDITOR /etc/systemd/system/bolt-agent.service # to change API_KEY
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable bolt-agent
systemctl start bolt-agent

Docker

You can use the docker image from GitHub:

Usage:

docker run -v /tmp:/tmp -e API_KEY=changeme ghcr.io/bolt-observer/agent:v0.2.2

Filtering on agent side

You can limit what channnels are reported using --channel-whitelist option. It specifies a local file path to be used as a whitelist of what channels to report. Channel IDs are short channel identifiers in LND format (a valid id is 792080480214450176 but not 720393x2228x0) When adding --private to --channel-whitelist this means every private channel AND whatever is listed in the file. There is also --public to allow all public channels. Using the options without --channel-whitelist makes no sense since by default all public channels are reported however it has to be explicit with --channel-whitelist in order to automatically allow all public channels (beside what is allowed through the file). If you set --private and --public then no matter what you add to the --channel-whitelist file everything will be reported.

The file looks like this:

# Comments start with a # character
# You can list pubkeys for example:
0288037d3f0bdcfb240402b43b80cdc32e41528b3e2ebe05884aff507d71fca71a # bolt.observer
# which means any channel where peer pubkey is this
# or you can specify a specific short channel id e.g.,
759930760125546497
# too, invalid lines like
whatever
# will be ignored (and logged as a warning, aliases also don't work!)
# Validity for channel id is not checked (it just has to be numeric), thus:
1337
# is perfectly valid (altho it won't match and thus allow the reporting of
# any additional channel).
# Empty files means nothing - in whitelist context: do not report anything.

Components

Internally we use:

• nodedata: an abstraction for running the periodic checks and reporting balance related changes
• filter: this is used to filter specific channels on the agent side
• checkermonitoring: is used for reporting metrics via Graphite (not used directly in bolt-agent here)
• lightning: an abstraction around lightning node API (that furthermore heavily depends on common code from lnd)
• lnsocket: a way to establish a commando connection with CLN nodes
• agent: is the GRPC client for reporting payment data
• actions: is the GRPC client for getting what actios to invoke
• raw: is the connection between agent API and lightning API
• plugins: contains the plugins

You might want to read about boltz plugin.

Dependencies

This code depends on some common code.

Documentation

Read complete documentation on: https://docs.bolt.observer.

Troubleshooting

Do:

go get -v github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd@v0.15.4-beta

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