lightning-faucet

README

Lightning Network Faucet

    

The Lightning Network Faucet is a faucet that is currently deployed on the Bitcoin and Litecoin testnets.

• Bitcoin: https://faucet.lightning.community
• Litecoin: https://ltc.faucet.lightning.community

The Testnet Lightning Faucet (TLF) is similar to other existing Bitcoin faucets. However, rather then sending bitcoin directly on-chain to a user of the faucet, the TLF will instead open a payment channel with the target user. The user can then either use their new link to the Lightning Network to facilitate payments, or immediately close the channel (which immediately credits them on-chain like regular faucets).

Currently the TLF is only compatible with lnd, but in the near future as the other Lightning implementations (eclair, c-lightning, lit, and more) become compatible, the faucet will also be usable between all the active implementations.

Installation

In order to build from source, the following build dependencies are required:

• Go: Installation instructions can be found here.

  It is recommended to add $GOPATH/bin to your PATH at this point. Note: If you are building with Go 1.5, then you'll need to enable the vendor experiment by setting the GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT environment variable to 1. If you're using Go 1.6 or later, then it is safe to skip this step.

• Glide: This project uses Glide to manage dependencies as well as to provide reproducible builds. To install Glide, execute the following command (assumes you already have Go properly installed):

  $ go get -u github.com/Masterminds/glide
  

With the preliminary steps completed, to install the Testnet Lightning Faucet

$ git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-faucet $GOPATH/src/github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-faucet
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-faucet
$ glide install
$ go install -v

Deploying The Faucet

Once you have the faucet installed, you'll need to ensure you have a local lnd active and fully synced.

Once the node is synced, execute the following command (from this directory) to deploy the faucet:

lightning-faucet --lnd_ip=X.X.X.X

Where X.X.X.X is the public, reachable IP address for your active lnd node. The configuration for the faucet includes a TLS certificate provided by Let's Encrypt so your faucet will be reachable over https by default.

Updating

To update your version of the TLF to the latest version run the following commands:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-faucet
$ git pull && glide install
$ go install -v