# Get Aperture

Aperture is a reverse proxy that acts as a payment and authentication gateway for Lightning Network powered APIs. It can handle gRPC requests over HTTP/2 as well as REST over HTTP/1 and 2.

Aperture receives incoming connections, verifies the validity of the [L402](https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l402) and either forwards the request to the appropriate end point, or obtains a [Macaroon](https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l402/macaroons) and sends it together with a Lightning invoice and the HTTP status code 402 Payment Required.

Aperture is currently used in production in Lightning [Loop](https://docs.lightning.engineering/lightning-network-tools/loop) and [Pool](https://docs.lightning.engineering/lightning-network-tools/pool).

## Install Aperture

Requirements: go 1.19 or later

`git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture.git`\
`cd aperture`\
`make install`

## Configure Aperture

`mkdir ~/.aperture`\
`cp sample-conf.yaml ~/.aperture/aperture.yaml`

By default Aperture uses port 8081. This port needs to be reachable from the outside.

Aperture will create a TLS key and self-signed certificate. To run Aperture in production, it will need a valid TLS certificate for the domain it is running on.

## Run Aperture

To run Aperture, simply run the following command.

`aperture`

## L402 demo

A demonstration of L402 can be found at <https://lsat-playground-bucko.vercel.app/> ([Testnet version here](https://testnet-lsat-playground.vercel.app/))

Here you can go through the process of minting a Macaroon, turning it into an L402, restricting and validating it as well as see code snippets.

[See how the client interceptor is coded in Aperture](https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture/blob/master/l402/client_interceptor.go)

{% embed url="<https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=22815s&v=LlTCipHKTCs>" %}
Watch: Using Aperture
{% endembed %}


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