lndmanage 0.8.0.1

Channel management tool for lightning network daemon (LND) operators.

lndmanage

lndmanage is a command line tool for advanced channel management of an LND node.

Current feature list (use the --help flag for subcommands):

• Activity reports report
• Display the node summary status
• Advanced channel listings listchannels
  • listchannels rebalance: list channels for rebalancing
  • listchannels forwardings: list forwarding statistics for each channel
  • listchannels hygiene: information for closing of active channels
  • listchannels inactive: information on inactive channels
• Rebalancing command rebalance
  • different rebalancing strategies can be chosen
  • a target 'balancedness' can be specified (e.g. to empty the channel)
• Circular self-payments circle
• Recommendation of good nodes recommend-nodes

DISCLAIMER: This is BETA software, so please be careful (All actions are executed as a dry run unless you call lndmanage with the --reckless flag though). No warranty is given.

Command line options

usage: lndmanage.py [-h] [--loglevel {INFO,DEBUG}]
                    {status,listchannels,rebalance,circle} ...

Lightning network daemon channel management tool.

positional arguments:
  {status,listchannels,rebalance,circle}
    circle              circular self-payment
    listchannels        lists channels with extended information [see also
                        subcommands with -h]
    rebalance           rebalance a channel
    recommend-nodes     recommends nodes [see also subcommands with -h]
    report              displays reports of activity on the node
    status              display node status

Activity Report

With lndmanage you can get a compact overview of what happened during the last day(s). It will show you forwarding activity (total forwardings, forwarding fees, and forwarding amounts) as well as channel opening and closing events by invoking

$ lndmanage report

Different time intervals can be specified with the --from-days-ago and --to-days-ago flags.

Here is a sample report for one of the subreports. The activity histogram for the time interval is displayed as a one-line histogram, which consists of Braille-like characters.

Report from yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm to yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm

Forwardings:
   activity (⣿ represents 8 forwardings):

   |⠀⠀⡀⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣄⠀⣀⠀⣦⣀⠀⡀⡀⠀⡀⡀⠀⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⣀⡀⣀⡀⡀⣀⠀⣀⡀⣄|

   total forwardings: 37
   forwardings per day: 37

   channels with most outgoing forwardings:
   cidxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 10
   cidxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 6
   cidxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 4
   cidxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 3
   cidxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: 3

Rebalancing a channel

The workflow for rebalancing a channel goes as follows:

• take a look at all your unbalanced channels with:

  $ lndmanage listchannels rebalance

  The output will look like:

   -------- Description --------
  cid        channel id
  ub         unbalancedness [-1 ... 1] (0 is 50:50 balanced)
  cap        channel capacity [sat]
  lb         local balance [sat]
  rb         remote balance [sat]
  pbf        peer base fee [msat]
  pfr        peer fee rate
  annotation channel annotation
  alias      alias
  -------- Channels --------
         cid            ub       cap        lb        rb    pbf       pfr alias
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -0.78   1000000    888861     99480     10  0.000200   abc                
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -0.63   1000000    814537    173768    300  0.000010   def
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  0.55   2000000    450792   1540038     35  0.000002   ghi
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  0.59    400000     81971    306335    400  0.000101   jkl
  ...

• the ub field tells you how unbalanced your channel is and in which direction

• take a channel_id from the list you wish to rebalance (target is a 50:50 balance)

• do a dry run to see what's waiting for you

  $ lndmanage rebalance --max-fee-sat 20 --max-fee-rate 0.00001 channel_id

• read the output and if everything looks well, then run with the --reckless flag

• in order to increase the success probability of your rebalancing you can try to do it in smaller chunks, which can be set by the flag --chunksize 0.5 (in this example only half the amounts are used)

A more sophisticated way to see if funds have to be reallocated is to have a look at the forwarding statistics of, e.g., the last two months of the individual channels with $ lndmanage listchannels forwardings --from-days-ago 60 --sort-by='fees' (here sorted by total fees, but it can be sorted by any column field).

The output will look like:

-------- Description --------
cid        channel id
nfwd       number of forwardings
age        channel age [days]
fees       total fees [sat]
f/w        total fees per week [sat / week]
flow       flow direction (positive is outwards)
ub         unbalancedness [-1 ... 1] (0 is 50:50 balanced)
bwd        bandwidth demand: capacity / max(mean_in, mean_out)
r          action is required
cap        channel capacity [sat]
pbf        peer base fee [msat]
pfr        peer fee rate
annotation channel annotation
alias      alias
-------- Channels --------
       cid         nfwd   age  fees     f/w  flow    ub  bwd r     cap  pbf      pfr  alias
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    6   103   907 106.950  1.00  0.30 0.00 X 6000000  231 0.000006    abc
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    3    82   300  35.374 -0.08  0.74 0.70   1000000 1000 0.000001    def
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    4    32   216  25.461  0.42  0.38 0.17 X 6000000 1003 0.000003    ghi
...

Channel hygiene

Inactive channels

Inactive channels (Zombie channels) lock up capital, which can be used elsewhere. In order to close those channels it is useful to take a look at the inactive channels with $ lndmanage listchannels inactive.

You will get an output like:

-------- Description --------
cid        channel id
lupp       last update time by peer [days ago]
priv       channel is private
ini        true if we opened channel
age        channel age [days]
ub         unbalancedness [-1 ... 1] (0 is 50:50 balanced)
cap        channel capacity [sat]
lb         local balance [sat]
rb         remote balance [sat]
sr/w       sent and received per week [sat]
annotation channel annotation
alias      alias

-------- Channels --------
cid                lupp priv ini age    ub     cap    lb   rb sr/w alias
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   66  ✗   ✓   71  0.03 2000000 10000  100    0   abc
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   20  ✗   ✗  113 -0.23   40000     0    0    0   def
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   19  ✓   ✗   21  1.00 1200000  1000    0    0   ghi
...

Channels, which were updated a long time ago (lupp) are likely to be inactive in the future and may be closed. Be aware, that if you are the initiator of the channel, you have to pay a hefty fee for the force closing.

Active channels

As well as inactive channels, active channels can lock up capital that is better directed towards other nodes. In order to facilitate the hard decision whether a channel should be closed, one can have a look at the $ lndmanage listchannels hygiene command output, which will display relevant data of the last 60 days:

-------- Description --------
cid        channel id
age        channel age [days]
nfwd       number of forwardings
f/w        total fees per week [sat / week]
ulr        ratio of uptime to lifetime of channel [0 ... 1]
lb         local balance [sat]
cap        channel capacity [sat]
pbf        peer base fee [msat]
pfr        peer fee rate
annotation channel annotation
alias      alias
-------- Channels --------
       cid           age  nfwd    f/w   ulr        lb       cap   pbf      pfr alias           
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   315     0   0.00  0.20       100     91000  1000 0.000001 abc 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   221     0   0.00  0.80         0    400000  1000 0.000001 def 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    36     0   0.00  0.99         0    200000  1000 0.000001 ghi 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    24     5   0.20  1.00    100000   4000000   500 0.000001 jkl 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   117    10   1.10  1.00     30000    500000  1000 0.000001 mno

You can base your decision on the number of forwardings nfwd and the fees collected per week f/w. If those numbers are low and the local balance lb is high and the channel already had enough time (age) to prove itself, you may want to consider closing the channel. Another way to judge the reliability of the channel is to look at the proportion the channel stayed active when your node was active, given by the ulr column.

Channel opening strategies

Which nodes best to connect to in the Lightning Network is ongoing research. This also depends on your personal use case, whether you are a paying user, a routing node operator or a service provider (or subsets of those). Therefore we need to empirically test, what good nodes mean to us. lndmanage gives you a few options to chose nodes from the network based on several heuristics:

• recommend-nodes good-old: Based on historic forwardings of closed channels, a list of nodes is compiled with which your node has already had a good relationship. Due to that relationship, good interaction with that node in the future is likely.
• recommend-nodes flow-analysis: If your node has already routed payments, you can use this information to your favor. If you want to improve your position in the Lightning Network for routing, you may want to look for need of inbound liquidity. This can be achieved by estimating the probability where the payments you routed were ending up. If you connect to those nodes directly you bypass outher routing nodes.
• recommend-nodes external-source: This command lets you access text-based lists of nodes, which are associated with economic activity. You can provide a URL, which is parsed for node public keys and suggests nodes to connect to (defaults to the list of lightning networkstores). Another example of the command using 'bos-scores' is $ lndmanage recommend-nodes external-source --source https://nodes.lightning.computer/availability/v1/btc.json.
• recommend-nodes channel-openings: When lightning nodes of new services are bootstrapped by opening a bunch of channels at the same time, we can detect this. Typically, a node with a large number of channel fluctuation signals economic activity. As the newly opened channels will predominantly be of outbound type, the node will have a large demand for inbound liquidity, which is something you want to exploit as a routing node.

lndmanage supports a channel annotation functionality. This serves for remembering why a certain channel was opened. By adding the funding transaction id or channel id to the config file ~/.lndmanage/config.ini under the annotations section (as specified in config_sample.ini), annotations can be saved. These annotations will then appear in the listchannels views.

Setup

lndmanage will be developed in lockstep with lnd and tagged accordingly. If you are running an older version of lnd checkout the according tag.

Requirements: python3.6, lnd v0.8.0-beta

If you run this tool from a different host than the lnd host, make sure to copy /path/to/.lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet/admin.macaroon and /path/to/.lnd/tls.cert to your local machine, which you need for later configuration.

Linux:

You can install lndmanage via two methods:

1. Install with pip (recommended):

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ python3 -m pip install lndmanage

2. Install from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/bitromortac/lndmanage
$ cd lndmanage
$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ python3 setup.py install

Windows (powershell):

Install python3, git, and visual studio build tools.

You need to set the environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING for proper encoding to: $env:PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8"

1. Install with pip (recommended):

$ py -m venv venv
$ .\venv\Scripts\activate
$ python -m pip install lndmanage

2. Install from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/bitromortac/lndmanage
$ cd lndmanage
$ py -m venv venv
$ .\venv\Scripts\activate
$ python setup.py install

Configuration:

When starting lndmanage for the first time, it will create a runtime folder /home/user/.lndmanage, where the configuration config.ini and log files reside. This folder location can be overwritten by setting an environment variable LNDMANAGE_HOME. If you run this tool from a remote host to the lnd host, you need to configure config.ini.

Running lndmanage

The installation process created an executable lndmanage, which will only be available if the created python environment is active (your prompt should have an (venv) in front):

$ source venv/bin/activate

then run

(venv) $ lndmanage status

If it works, you should see the node status.

Running lndmanage interactively (recommended)

lndmanage supports an interactive mode with command history. The interactive mode has the advantage that the network graph has to be read into memory only once, giving a much faster execution time for subsequent command invocations.

Interacive mode is started by calling lndmanage without arguments:

$ lndmanage
Running in interactive mode. You can type 'help' or 'exit'.
$ lndmanage listchannels forwardings
<output>
$ lndmanage exit

Commands that can be entered are the ones you would give as arguments.

Testing

Requirements are an installation of lnregtest and links to bitcoind, bitcoin-cli, lnd, and lncli in the test/bin folder.

Tests can be run with python3 -m unittest discover test from the root folder.

Docker

Due to restructuring of the project, this option is currently defunct.

If you prefer to run lndmanage from a docker container, cd docker and follow README there.

Compiling grpc in python [development]

$ cd grpc_compiled
$ pip install grpcio grpcio-tools googleapis-common-protos
$ git clone https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis.git
$ curl -o rpc.proto -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/master/lnrpc/rpc.proto
$ python -m grpc_tools.protoc --proto_path=googleapis:. --python_out=. --grpc_python_out=. rpc.proto