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Install your own Lightning Node Connect relay proxy server, the mailbox, which comes bundled in Aperture. |
Lightning Node Connect (LNC) is a protocol that establishes a connection between your Lightning Network node (LND) and a remote application, such as Lightning Terminal or Zeus.
To traverse firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT), LNC makes use of a mailbox proxy. This proxy is part of the open-source aperture and can be installed freely by anybody.
LNC is most useful when both the client and the Lightning node are behind a firewall or NAT, but it can also be useful when only the Lightning node is unreachable. In this case, aperture may be installed on the same machine as the client application.
To compile aperture we will need golang. You may follow the official documentation or look at the relevant chapter in the LND installation guides.
Next we are going to install aperture.
git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture.git
git checkout v[latest version]
make install\
Aperture needs to run as root to be able to permanently bind to the port where it will be listening.
Depending on your go path, you may have to move aperture to where the root user can find it too.
sudo cp $GOPATH/bin/aperture /usr/local/bin/aperture
Next, we are going to switch to the superuser and create our configuration file.
sudo -i
mkdir ~/.aperture
nano ~/.aperture/aperture.yaml
Use this template and don’t forget to swap the domain name with your own. This domain name should also point to the server on which you are setting up aperture!
listenaddr: "lnc.yourlightning.app:443"
debuglevel: "trace"
autocert: true
servername: lnc.yourlightning.app
authenticator:
disable: true
hashmail:
enabled: true
messagerate: 1ms
messageburstallowance: 99999999
prometheus:
enabled: false
To run aperture, we only need to execute one command.
aperture
The logs may show that aperture is now listening for connections.
[INF] APER: Configuring autocert for server lnc.yourlightning.app with cache dir /root/.aperture/autocert
[INF] APER: Starting the server, listening on lnc.yourlightning.app:443.
We can now connect our LND node to Lightning Terminal using our own mailbox. You will need litd running alongside LND. Learn how to install litd here.
litcli sessions add --label="My own mailbox" --type admin --mailboxserveraddr lnc.yourlightningapp:443
Next we type the generated 10-word connection string into Lightning Terminal, together with the url and port number of our mailbox.
Connect your node to Lightning Terminal via LNC and your own proxy server
We can now connect, select and confirm a password and control our Lightning node remotely!
On some VPS providers, aperture fails to correctly bind to the address and port it listens on.
root@mailbox:~# aperture
[INF] APER: Configuring autocert for server lnc.yourlightningapp.com with cache dir /root/.aperture/autocert
[INF] APER: Starting the server, listening on lnc.yourlightningapp.com:443.
[ERR] APER: Error while running aperture: listen tcp 172.81.180.188:443: bind: cannot assign requested address
[INF] APER: Shutdown complete
We navigate to the systemd directory and create a new service.
cd /etc/systemd/system
sudo nano aperture.service
Here we may paste the following template
[Unit]
Description=LNC mailbox service
[Service]
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/root
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/aperture
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
To reload the list of services
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
To start the aperture service
sudo systemctl start aperture.service
To check the status of the service
sudo systemctl status aperture.service