Install Lnd
liongrass / May 2023 (822 Words, 5 Minutes)
Installing LND
The Lightning Network Daemon (LND) is a Lightning Network node implementation written in go. It is by far the most popular routing node on the Lightning Network today. You can find it’s source code at github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd.
Litd is a software bundle that includes LND, as well as Lightning Lab’s Lightning Network tools Loop, Pool, Faraday and in the future, Taproot Assets. Through litd we can access other useful features such as LND Accounts, Lightning Node Connect and Lightning Terminal.
In this section, we are going to install the litd software bundle to give us easy access to all of the features we need without going through multiple installations. Litd is fully open-source.
Useful resources:
Similar to Bitcoin Core, there are two ways we can download litd:
- From source, meaning built from the raw source code
- As a binary from the project’s website, meaning as a program ready to be executed
Downloading the binary from the project’s repository would again be the most convenient, but we will nonetheless compile it from source for maximum verifiability and accountability.
From source
Unlike with Bitcoin Core, we will not need to install many dependencies, and the compilation process will be much quicker. But we will need to install the programming language golang, as it does not come bundled with Ubuntu by default.
Install dependencies
We will need to install nodejs and yarn.
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_20.x | sudo -E bash - &&\
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
sudo npm install --global yarn
Install/Upgrade go
if GO is already installed and needs to be upgraded, do this procedure to find out installation folder, make sure the path on the third like matches the output of which go command.
go version
which go
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go
We can find the latest version of go on its official website. At the time of writing, this is go1.22.5. We open a terminal on our Ubuntu machine or SSH into it and download the golang source code.
cd ~/Downloads
wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.23.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
Note: if ~/Downloads folder does not exist on your machine create a folder and try again
mkdir ~/Downloads
We are now going to unpack this repository with the command:
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.23.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
Next we will have to make sure our machine learns about where to find the golang code, and where to place programs that we will install with go. To do that, we are going to edit the .bashrc file.
nano ~/.bashrc
At the very bottom, we will place the following snippet:
### GOLANG
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
export GOPATH=~/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
We will once again save our edits with Ctrl + O and Enter, then exit the editor with Ctrl + X.
We can now check our installation.
bash
go version
go version
The output should read: go version go1.23.2 linux/amd64
Downloading the source code
We’ll once again enter our git directory, where we download our source code.
cd ~/git
Next we are going to download the source code for litd directly from the Github repository.
git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal.git
cd lightning-terminal
Compiling litd
Before we compile the software, we will need to specify which version we want to compile. At the time of this writing, the latest version is called 0.13.1. You can check the latest version on the release page of the project.
git checkout v0.13.4-alpha
We can now install the software with
make install
make go-install-cli
We can verify that litd is properly installed on our machine with:
litcli --version
It should output litcli version 0.13.1-alpha commit=v0.13.1-alpha.
Congratulations, you now have LND, Pool, Loop, Faraday and litd installed on your machine! We can continue to the next guide to configure it.
Downloading the binary
We once again navigate to our downloads folder, which should already exist on our machine.
cd ~/Downloads
Next we are going to download the correct binary. On the project’s website we can find the available software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. If you are running your node on a Raspberry Pi, choose the ARM Linux link and copy it. Most others will use the linux-amd64[...].tar.gz link. In Linux, we will download it like this. Replace the filename with your filename if you are using a different version, or a different operating system.
wget https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal/releases/download/v0.12.4-alpha/lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.12.4-alpha.tar.gz
This is a compressed file, similar to a .zip file or .rar file. We can unpack it with the following command:
tar xvf lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.12.4-alpha.tar.gz
This will place our binaries into a new folder. We are going to move it somwhere where our system can permanently find it.
sudo mv lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.12.4-alpha/* /usr/local/bin/
We can verify that litd is properly installed on our machine with:
litcli --version
It should output litcli version 0.12.4-alpha commit=v0.12.4-alpha-dirty.
Congratulations, you now have LND, Pool, Loop, Faraday and litd installed on your machine! We can continue to the next guide to configure it.