NAT Traversal

lnd has support for NAT traversal using a number of different techniques. At the time of writing this documentation, UPnP and NAT-PMP are supported. NAT traversal can be enabled through lnd's --nat flag.

⛰  lnd ... --nat

On startup, lnd will try the different techniques until one is found that's supported by your hardware. The underlying dependencies used for these techniques rely on using system-specific binaries in order to detect your gateway device's address. This is needed because we need to be able to reach the gateway device to determine if it supports the specific NAT traversal technique currently being tried. Because of this, due to uncommon setups, it is possible that these binaries are not found in your system. If this is case, lnd will exit stating such error.

As a bonus, lnd spawns a background thread that automatically detects IP address changes and propagates the new address update to the rest of the network. This is especially beneficial for users who were provided dynamic IP addresses from their internet service provider.