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Bifrost

Bifrost is an invite-based lightning network channel-opening service written in the Python programming language.

Lnd is currently supported as the backend node for channel opening to other wallets and nodes.

Due to the low throughput of the application, SQLite is database backend used to store invites and track usage. It should be trivial to change this if you know what you're doing. Please see the DATABASE_URL parameter in the configuration options below. Please note that you'll need to install the necessary packages to support your chosen database backend.

Installation of dependencies

To install all the required dependencies needed to run Bifrost, run the following command. This may also be done within a virtualenv.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Once all the dependencies have been installed, you can then create a .env file that will contain all the configuration parameters for your instance.

The following are a list of currently available configuration options and a short explanation of what each does.

DATABASE_URL (required; e.g. sqlite:///bifrost.db) This specifies the SQLite 3 file and path to use for storing invites for Bifrost.

BASE_URL (required) This parameter defines the base url to use in constructing urls for use within the application. You should set it to a url of the form https://yourdomain.tld. The lnurl spec only supports https urls so be sure to make this a https url or your users may have problems connecting to the service.

NODE_URI (required; in the form pubkey@host/ip:port) The node uri is an identifier for your lightning network node, you can obtain this by running the command lncli getinfo and copying any of the values in uris.

LND_NETWORK (optional; defaults to mainnet) This selects the network that your node is configured for. This may take any of the supported values for your lnd node.

LND_GRPC_HOST (optional; defaults to localhost) If your node is not on your local machine (say on a different server), you'll need to change this value to the appropriate value.

LND_GRPC_PORT (optional; defaults to 10009) If the GRPC port for your node was changed to anything other than the default you'll need to update this as well.

LND_FEE_RATE (optional) In cases, where you want a fixed fee rate for opening channels, you can set this parameter to an integer representing your chosen fee rate in sats/byte.

LND_SPEND_UNCONFIRMED (optional; defaults to True) Takes values of either True or False and determines if your node is allowed to spend unconfirmed outputs when opening channels.

LND_FORCE_PRIVATE (optional; defaults to False) The lnurl spec allows the requesting node to determine whether it wants a public or private channel. If you want to restrict this choice to private channels only, then you'll need to set the value of this parameter to True.

Initializing the database

To initialize the database which would create the database file and all the necessary tables, run the command:

$ ./app.py initdb

Loading invites

Invites codes could be any unique combination of characters and numbers which form a part of a URL that gets shared with your users. The invite file itself is a CSV file containing the invite code, followed by the opening channel capacity (in sats) and then followed by the amount (in sats) to push to the remote wallet when the channel is open. If you don't want to push any amount to the remote wallet, this value should be set to 0. Below is an example of a CSV file that can be imported into Bifrost.

Ogh5sh,500000,10000
xuJei1,500000,0
iWae0o,500000,0
Aikio7,500000,0
tiew6O,500000,0

The first line with invite code Ogh5sh will open a channel with capacity 500,000 sats with 10,000 sats pushed to the remote wallet. The invite URL to share will be of the form BASE_URL/i/invite_code an example of which will be: https://yourdomain.tld/i/Ogh5sh.

To load the invites into the database, run the command:

$ ./app.py load invite_file.csv

Where invite_file.csv is the file name and path to a CSV file containing the invites.

Running the application server

After installing the dependencies, configuring the application, initializing the database and loading the invites, you can start the application backend by running the command:

$ ./app.py run