Ansible LND role

Ansible role to install the Lightning Network Daemon (LND) as a systemd service. By default, it uses sane defaults and some hardening measures for the Systemd service.

By default, all binaries are installed inside /usr/local/lnd-<version>/ directory. So for example, if you are installing the version v0.16.0-beta, if you want to invoke the lncli binary, you will need to use /usr/local/lnd-v0.16.0-beta/lncli.

Requirements

This role requires a user with sudo permissions to work properly.

List of officially supported operating systems:

ID	Name	Status
ubuntu2004	Ubuntu 20.04	✅
ubuntu2204	Ubuntu 22.04	✅

How to run this?

Create a playbook like this one:

- hosts: lnd
  roles:
    - role: fooock.lnd
      become: yes

Note that you can use become at a global level instead at the role level. Now you can execute your playbook executing:

ansible-playbook -i $VM_TARGET_IP, -u $VM_TARGET_USER --ask-become-pass playbook.yml

Testing

You can execute tests using molecule. Install the requirements.txt to execute tests using the Docker driver. Inside this directory execute:

$ molecule test

Variables

You can change some variables to install this role to fit your needs. The default values to install the Lightning daemon node are the following ones:

Name	Value
lnd_user	lnd
lnd_group	lnd
lnd_version	0.16.0-beta
lnd_arch	linux-amd64

If you want to install LND into a Raspberry you need to change the architecture to linux-aarch64.

By default, this installer uses gpg to verify the integrity and signature of the downloaded artifacts. This behaviour is controlled by the lnd_pgp_keys field. The content of this structure is a list of names available in the official Github repository.

If you only want to verify with one user, you should use something like this:

lnd_pgp_keys:
  - roasbeef

Internally this method downloads the user.asc file and does all the job verifying the release. If the release can't be trusted the role will fail the installation.

To configure the LND node, you can use the following variables:

Name	Value	Note
lnd_data_dir	/data/lnd
lnd_network	mainnet	Valid values are: testnet and simnet
lnd_alias	fooock
lnd_log_level	info
lnd_listen	127.0.0.1
lnd_tls_extra_domain	$HOSTNAME	Default VM hostname

Since by default the expected behavior is that LND node will run in the same instance where the Bitcoin node is running, you can use the following fields (you need to change them if required):

Name	Value
lnd_bitcoind_dir	/data/bitcoin
lnd_bitcoind_config	/etc/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
lnd_bitcoind_rpc_host	127.0.0.1
lnd_bitcoind_rpc_user	bitcoin
lnd_bitcoind_rpc_password	bitcoin