lnd-grpc

A simple library to provide a Python 3 interface to the lnd lightning client gRPC.

This version of the library has been compiled with rpc.proto from the v0.6-beta tag on github

Install requires:

• grpcio
• grpcio-tools
• googleapis-common-protos

Note: Configuration for coins other than bitcoin will require modifying the source code directly.

Installation via pip

pip install lnd-grpc

Bitcoin setup

bitcoind or btcd must be running and be ready to accept rpc connections from lnd.

LND setup

lnd daemon must be running on the host machine. This can typically be accomplished in a screen/tmux session.

If lnd.conf is not already configured to communicate with your bitcoin client, an example lnd daemon startup command for bitcoind connection might look like:

lnd --bitcoin.active \
--bitcoin.mainnet \
--debuglevel=debug \
--bitcoin.node=bitcoind \
--bitcoind.rpcuser=xxxxx \
--bitcoind.rpcpass=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx \
--externalip=xx.xx.xx.xx \
--bitcoind.zmqpubrawblock=tcp://host:port \
--bitcoind.zmqpubrawtx=tcp://host:port \
--rpclisten=host:port

Usage

Import the module into your project:

import lnd_grpc

Create an instance of the client class:

lnd_rpc = lnd_grpc.Client()

Note: The class is instantiated to work with default bitcoind rpc port and lnd in default installation directory, on mainnet, unless additional arguments are passed.

The class instantiation takes the the following arguments which you can change as required:

    (
    lnd_dir: str = None, \
    macaroon_path: str = None, \
    tls_cert_path: str = None \
    network: str = 'mainnet', \
    grpc_host: str = 'localhost', \
    grpc_port: str = '10009'
    )

Initialization of a new lnd installation

Note: If you have already created a wallet during lnd setup/installation you can skip this section.

If this is the first time you have run lnd you will not have a wallet created. 'Macaroons', the authentication technique used to communicate securely with lnd, are tied to a wallet (seed) and therefore an alternative connection must be made with lnd to create the wallet, before recreating the connection stub using the wallet's macaroon.

Initialization requires the following steps:

1. Generate a new seed lnd_rpc.gen_seed()
2. Initialize a new wallet lnd_rpc.init_wallet()

Connecting and re-connecting after wallet created

If you did not run the initialization sequence above, you will only need to unlock your wallet before issuing further RPC commands:

lnd_rpc.unlock_wallet(password='wallet_password')

General usage

Further RPC commands can then be issued to the lnd gRPC interface using the following convention, where LND gRPC commands are converted from CamelCase to lowercase_with_underscores and keyword arguments named to exactly match the parameters the gRPC uses:

lnd_rpc.grpc_command(keyword_arg=value)

Valid gRPC commands and their keyword arguments can be found here

Connection stubs will be generated dynamically as required to ensure channel freshness.

Response-streaming RPCs now return the python iterators to be operated on directly (e.g. with .__next__())

Loop usage

LND must be re-built and installed as per the loop instructions found at the Loop Readme.

Loopd should then be installed as per the same instructions and started manually.

Then you can import and use the RPC client using the following code:

import loop_rpc

loop = loop_rpc.LoopClient()