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Install Lnd

liongrass / May 2023 (1073 Words, 6 Minutes)

academy lnd

Installing LND

The Lightning Network Daemon (LND) is a Lightning Network node implementation written in go. It is by far the most popular routing node on the Lightning Network today. You can find it’s source code at github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd.

Litd is a software bundle that includes LND, as well as Lightning Lab’s Lightning Network tools Loop, Pool, Faraday and Taproot Assets. Through litd we can access other useful features such as LND Accounts, Lightning Node Connect and Lightning Terminal.

In this section, we are going to install the litd software bundle to give us easy access to all of the features we need without going through multiple installations. Litd is fully open-source.

Useful resources:

Similar to Bitcoin Core, there are two ways we can download litd:

Downloading the binary from the project’s repository would again be the most convenient, but we will nonetheless compile it from source for maximum verifiability and accountability.

From source

Unlike with Bitcoin Core, we will not need to install many dependencies, and the compilation process will be much quicker. But we will need to install the programming language golang, as it does not come bundled with Ubuntu by default.

Install dependencies

We will need to install nodejs and yarn.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.3/install.sh | bash
\. "$HOME/.nvm/nvm.sh"
nvm install 22

We can then verify that nodejs is installed by running:

node -v

Which should show something like: v22.19.0 Enabling yarn is then as easy as:

corepack enable yarn

You can verify yarn is installed by running:

yarn -v

The first time you do that, you will be asked to confirm the download. Enter Y and press Enter to continue.

Install/Upgrade go

if GO is already installed and needs to be upgraded, do this procedure to find out installation folder, make sure the path on the third like matches the output of which go command.

go version

which go

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go

We can find the latest version of go on its official website. At the time of writing, this is go1.22.5. We open a terminal on our Ubuntu machine or SSH into it and download the golang source code.

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.25.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Note: if ~/Downloads folder does not exist on your machine create a folder and try again

mkdir ~/Downloads

We are now going to unpack this repository with the command:

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.25.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Next we will have to make sure our machine learns about where to find the golang code, and where to place programs that we will install with go. To do that, we are going to edit the .bashrc file.

nano ~/.bashrc

At the very bottom, we will place the following snippet:

### GOLANG
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
export GOPATH=~/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

We will once again save our edits with Ctrl + O and Enter, then exit the editor with Ctrl + X.

We can now check our installation.

bash
go version

The output should read: go version go1.25.1 linux/amd64

Downloading the source code

We’ll once again enter our git directory, where we download our source code.

cd ~/git

Next we are going to download the source code for litd directly from the Github repository.

git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal.git
cd lightning-terminal

Compiling litd

Before we compile the software, we will need to specify which version we want to compile. At the time of this writing, the latest version is called 0.13.1. You can check the latest version on the release page of the project.

git checkout v0.15.2-alpha

We can now install the software with

make install
make go-install-cli

We can verify that litd is properly installed on our machine with:

litd --version

It should output litd version 0.15.2-alpha commit=v0.15.2-alpha commit_hash=911f8cae52670332fe46affd35ff18458ebd5ffb.

Congratulations, you now have LND, Pool, Loop, Faraday and litd installed on your machine! We can continue to the next guide to configure it.

Downloading the binary

We once again navigate to our downloads folder, which should already exist on our machine.

cd ~/Downloads

Next we are going to download the correct binary. On the project’s website we can find the available software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. If you are running your node on a Raspberry Pi, choose the ARM Linux link and copy it. Most others will use the linux-amd64[...].tar.gz link. In Linux, we will download it like this. Replace the filename with your filename if you are using a different version, or a different operating system.

wget https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal/releases/download/v0.15.2-alpha/lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha.tar.gz

This is a compressed file, similar to a .zip file or .rar file. We can unpack it with the following command:

tar xvf lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha.tar.gz

As we don’t want to blindly trust the binaries being legit, we are going to verify them using GPG. To do that, we are going to add the GPG keys of the maintainer. We only have to do this once, as we upgrade later we will no longer have to download the key.

gpg --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 187F6ADD93AE3B0CF335AA6AB984570980684DCC

Next, we are going to download the manifest and the signature and check whether the manifest is properly signed.

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal/releases/download/v0.15.2-alpha/manifest-v0.15.2-alpha.txt
wget https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal/releases/download/v0.15.2-alpha/manifest-ViktorTigerstrom-v0.15.2-alpha.sig
gpg --verify manifest-ViktorTigerstrom-v0.15.2-alpha.sig manifest-v0.15.2-alpha.txt

We should get the result: gpg: Good signature from "Viktor Tigerström <vtigerstrom@gmail.com>"

Finally, we will have to check whether the SHA256 hash of the binaries we downloaded matches what is signed in the manifest.

cd ~/Downloads
echo "$(cat manifest-v0.15.2-alpha.txt) lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha.tar.gz" | sha256sum -c --ignore-missing

You should see OK printed behind every file:

lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha.tar.gz: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/frcli: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/litcli: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/litd: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/lncli: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/loop: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/pool: OK
lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/tapcli: OK

Now we will place our binaries into a new folder. We are going to move it somewhere where our system can permanently find it.

sudo mv lightning-terminal-linux-amd64-v0.15.2-alpha/* /usr/local/bin/

We can verify that litd is properly installed on our machine with:

litd --version

It should output litd version 0.15.2-alpha commit=v0.15.2-alpha commit_hash=911f8cae52670332fe46affd35ff18458ebd5ffb.

Congratulations, you now have LND, Pool, Loop, Faraday and litd installed on your machine! We can continue to the next guide to configure it.

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