Lightning Shell

Lightning Shell is a shell for Bitcoin nodes / personal servers.

It is currently used on Umbrel and Citadel.

Technically it’s a Docker container with ttyd and additional utilities.

Included utilities

General Lightning node management

• lncli & bos - The classics
• lntop - LN terminal dashboard

Fee management

• charge-lnd - Simple policy based fee manager
• suez - Tool for pretty printing and optimizing channels

Rebalancing tools

• rebalance-lnd
• igniter - Circular rebalancing by sending a payment back to yourself using a specific route
• perfectly-balanced - Script to make your LND node perfectly balanced

Market tools

• btc2fiat - Bitcoin price expressed in fiat currency. As simple as that.

Data tools

• bc - An arbitrary precision calculator language
• csview - A high performance CSV viewer
• jq - JSON processor
• sc-im - Spreadsheet program for your terminal

Networking

• dog - A command-line DNS client
• gping - Ping, but with a graph
• links - Web browser
• oha - HTTP load generator with TUI animation

Installation

The easiest way to install Lightning Shell is from your node’s app store.

At the opposite end of the spectrum you could simply copy-paste parts of the Dockerfile to build only the tools you want without actually installing Lightning Shell.

There are countless other ways to make use of it in between the two extremes because after all you can fork the repo, customize the Dockerfile, build it and run it yourself.

Configuration

Running any of the included utilities will just work without you having to tell them how to connect to LND.

How does this work?

Your personal server OS passes the LND_IP environment variable and mounts the lnd directory under /lnd when it launches the Lightning Shell Docker container.

There are some additional scripts in ~/.local/bin named the same as the included utilities, which take care of passing the necessary arguments to the respective utilities.