0xeeLi Notes

Notes & Tips

Some notes, tips, tricks, tweaks in no particular order! For myself and hopefully useful to the community.

One of the easiest way to make the first step into installing and handling a Bitcoin Lightning Node is to setup your own Alby Hub 🐝 A cheap VPS with 20GB storage and 2GB is way enough. In this section I'm keeping notes about things I could't find on Alby Hub Guides.

After playing around with Alby you can setup a full Lightning node running standalone LND or via the amazing LiTd (Lightning Terminal). Here is the official Builder's Guide to the LND Galaxy and you can use SLi • Symply Lightning utility to install and setup them within a few commands.

Alby Hub • HTTPS • VPS • Lighttpd

Alby Hub runs on port 8029 by default and must use a proxy (the process of forwarding requests) to get it work on a sub-domain. Summary steps: 

# Proxy to Alby Hub running on localhost:8029
$HTTP["host"] =~ "sub.domain.me" {
	proxy.server = ( "" => ( 
		( "host" => "127.0.0.1",
		  "port" => 8029 ) ) )
}

Using a reverse proxy is a way to access Alby Hub (itself or connected to your own LND node) but keep it as a spending wallet. Exposing any Lightning related service to the web is a security concern.

The most secure way to get Alby or LiT aka Lightning Terminal running on a remote server (VPS) is the run node related things on the server bu only in local mode and then use a SSH tunnel to access them from a home computer:

ssh -L 8029:127.0.0.1:8029 -N -f VPS_USER@VPS_IP

And of course, use a SSH key pair to connect, no direct login to the VPS and root login disabled (do I need to mention it...)

Lightning Terminal (LiT) Bundel

LiTd will replace LND to handle everything and provide a sexy web interface to manage the nodes, channels, pool, etc! It can be run in integrate mode or remote mode. My setup is a VPS with 2GB RAM, 2GB Swap (virtual disk created with dd) and 20GB of disk space, I rotate the logs to save place and have a custom lit.conf to save some memory usage, I use Neutrino mode so I dont need to download and sync the full Bitcoin chain (even pruned it take a lot of space and system resource)

I use sli install lit & slit init lit to have a working node in no time: Quick Guide to setup a node

Node • Wallet

To interact with the wallet we use lncli wallet or for basics operations such as sending BTC, you can use SLi Wallet: sli wa send who provide a nice and easy to use interactive mode.

Backup you Node!

That is so important and can save you lot of time and sats, I use SLi to generate an encrypted backup file and an old school cron task who backup everything important each 2 days witch can easily be restored. Launch crontab -e and add: 

0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/sli node-backup

Or setup a systemd service and timer (the modern way)

Node RAM Usage

When running a Lightning LND/LiTd node, monitoring resources is quiet important: Do I need more RAM, disk space, etc... ? Here are some probably useful commands to get memory resource usage on a Linux system using standard tools such as ps or top.

Get memory and disk usage the SLi and short way: 

sli nh

Using ps and assuming we run litd, we can get RAM usage in Mb with the help of the so famous awk: 

ps -p $(pgrep litd) -o rss | tail -n 1 | awk '{ print $1 / 1024 }'

Using the native top utility (ctrl+z to quit): 

top -p $(pgrep litd)