BLITSkrieg: Bitcoin Lightning Integration Test Service

BLITSkrieg is a gRPC server in Python that aims to provide a set of utilities to test Bitcoin and Lightning Network services.

It uses boltlight in order to hide the differences between the different LN node implementations.

Currently the available services are:

• bitcoind ^[1]
• boltlight ^[2]
• c-lightning
• eclair
• electrs ^[3]
• electrum
• lnd

Notes

1. docker image always necessary
2. docker image necessary to call LN-related commands
3. docker image necessary to run electrum

System dependencies

• Linux or macOS (Windows may work, but is not supported)
• Python 3.9+
• poetry
• docker

Build

In order to build the docker image for BLITSkrieg, run:

# production mode
$ ./unix_helper build

# development mode
$ ./unix_helper build-dev

Production mode does not include the package dev dependencies.

Pre-built (production mode) images for the latest versions can be downloaded from GitLab's container registry.

Run

In order to launch the docker image of BLITSkrieg, run:

# production mode
$ ./unix_helper run

# development mode
$ ./unix_helper run-dev

CLI

BLITSkrieg features a Command Line Interface, named bli. It can be installed and called from the project directory.

In order to install the project, run:

$ poetry install

In order to run bli, call it via poetry:

$ poetry run bli

bli supports shell completion for bash and zsh (the shell needs to have completion support enabled). It can be enabled sourcing the appropriate file for the running shell, from the project directory:

$ . ./blitskrieg/share/complete-bli.bash
$ . ./blitskrieg/share/complete-bli.zsh

Use

In order to run a command on BLITSkrieg, you can directly call it by making a gRPC call to it, or you can use its CLI.

To get a list of available CLI commands, run:

$ poetry run bli --help

In order to perform any action in BLITSkrieg, you first need to create a LN stack. To do so, call:

$ poetry run bli createstack [--<implementation>=<number_of_nodes>]

If you do not specify any LN node, this will run a single bitcoind instance and only Bitcoin-related commands will be available.

Visit our docker repository in order to build the required services. Otherwise, if the needed docker images are not available, they will be pulled from hashbeam's GitLab container registry.