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Beginner's Guide to the LND Galaxy

This sample application serves as a guide to begin learning how to communicate with an LND node to send and receive payments over the Lightning Network.

Overview

The goal of this guide is to get you familiar with adding payments functionality to your app using the lnd Lightning Network node software.

This application will be written in Typescript with a small amount of HTML+CSS. On the frontend we will use ReactJS to render the UI and mobx for managing the application state. On the backend we will use expressjs to host our API server and serve the app's data to multiple web clients.

To easily create a local Lightning Network, which exists solely on your computer, we will be using the Polar development tool.

We'll be making use of the LND gRPC API to interface with the LND node. A few of the API endpoints that we will be using throughout this application are:

Endpoint Description
getinfo returns general information concerning the lightning node
channelbalance returns the total funds available across all open channels in satoshis
signmessage signs a message with this node's private key
verifymessage verifies a signature of a message
addinvoice creates a new invoice which can be used by another node to send a payment
lookupinvoice look up an invoice according to its payment hash

The sample app we'll be starting with is a basic Reddit clone with this small list of features:

  • view a list of posts on the home page sorted by votes
  • click on the Upvote button for a post should increment its number of votes
  • create a post containing a username, title, and description

We'll add Lightning Network integration in this tutorial by implementing the following features:

  • connect your node to the app by providing your node's host, certificate and macaroon
  • display your node's alias and channel balance
  • create posts and sign them using your LND node's pubkey
  • verify posts made by other users
  • up-vote a post by paying 100 satoshis per vote

Running the App Locally

Requirements: NodeJS v12.x & Yarn v1.x

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/builders-guide-sample-app.git

Install dependencies

cd builders-guide-sample-app
yarn

Start the API server and client app development server

yarn dev

Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000.