Writing Your First CLN Plugin

Speaker: Chris Guida
Twitter: @cguida6

Welcome! In this tutorial, you'll write your own CLN plugin! To help you get started as fast as possible, we've put together a repl.it environment with Bitcoin Core (bitcoind) and Core Lightning (lightningd) already installed. So all you need to do is read through each section and follow the examples, and at the end you'll have a working CLN plugin.

Session Agenda:

• Build a minimal python plugin
  • An init method
  • An RPC method
  • An option
  • An event subscription
  • A hook
• Then we'll look at more complex plugins
  • Python: Sauron, Summary
  • Go: Peerswap, Circular
  • Rust: Holdinvoice, Smaug

What's in this Repl?

• bitcoind: you'll use this as your blockchain backend in regtest mode to test your plugin
• lightningd: a full, functional install of CLN suitable for testing your plugin