🛠️Installation

Installation

Lightning Pool is built very similarly to Lightning Loop: There is a process that is constantly running in the background, called the trader daemon (poold) and a command line tool to interact with the daemon, called just pool.

The poold trader daemon can be run either as a standalone binary connected to a compatible lnd node or integrated into Lightning Terminal (LiT).

Downloading the standalone binaries

The latest official release binaries can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.

Downloading as part of Lightning Terminal (LiT)

To run poold integrated into the Lightning Terminal, download the latest release of LiT and follow the installation instructions of LiT

Building the binaries from source

To build both the poold and pool binaries from the source code, at least the go 1.14 and make must be installed.

To download the code, compile and install it, the following commands can then be run:

$ git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/pool
$ cd pool
$ make install

This will install the binaries into your $GOPATH/bin directory.

Installing lnd

Lightning Pool needs to be connected to an lnd node version v0.11.1-beta or later to work. It is recommended to run an official release binary of lnd.

Installing lnd from source is also possible but needs to be done with all sub-server build flags enabled:

$ make install tags="signrpc walletrpc chainrpc invoicesrpc"

Running poold

If lnd is configured with the default values and is running on the same machine, poold will be able to connect to it automatically and can be started by simply running:

$ poold

# Or if you want to do everything in the same terminal and run poold in the
# background:
$ poold &

# For testnet mode, you'll need to specify the network as mainnet is the
# default:
$ poold --network=testnet

In the case that lnd is running on a remote node, the tls.cert and the admin.macaroon files from the lnd data directory need to be copied to the machine where poold is running.

The daemon can then be configured to connect to the remote lnd node by using the following command line flags:

$ poold --lnd.host=<the_remote_host_IP_address>:10009 \
        --lnd.macaroonpath=/some/directory/with/lnd/data/macaroons/admin.macaroon \
        --lnd.tlspath=/some/directory/with/lnd/data/tls.cert

To persist this configuration, these values can also be written to a configuration file, located in ~/.pool/<network>/poold.conf, for example:

~/.pool/mainnet/poold.conf

lnd.host=<the_remote_host_IP_address>:10009
lnd.macaroonpath=/some/directory/with/lnd/data/macaroons/admin.macaroon
lnd.tlspath=/some/directory/with/lnd/data/tls.cert

Configuration options

There is a range of operational settings that can be set to change the default logging behavior or change the directories where poold stores its data. To see the full list of options, run poold --help.

The following list only includes flags that have an impact on the match making or business related behavior of the Pool trader daemon:

Flag	Required	Default Value	Description
newnodesonly	No	false	If set to true the daemon will only buy channels from nodes it does not yet have channels with

Authentication and transport security

The gRPC and REST connections of poold are encrypted with TLS and secured with macaroon authentication the same way lnd is.

If no custom base directory is set then the TLS certificate is stored in ~/.pool/<network>/tls.cert and the base macaroon in ~/.pool/<network>/pool.macaroon.

The pool command will pick up these file automatically on mainnet if no custom base directory is used. For other networks it should be sufficient to add the --network flag to tell the CLI in what sub directory to look for the files.

For more information on macaroons, see the macaroon documentation of lnd.

NOTE: pool's macaroons are independent from lnd's. The same macaroon cannot be used for both poold and lnd.