lightning-node-ansible

This repository contains configuration for creating automated Bitcoin Core + Lightning Network installations by utilizing Ansible. A blog post by @dougvk outlines the manual setup very nicely: https://medium.com/@dougvk/run-your-own-mainnet-lightning-node-2d2eab628a8b

Each node runs the official Bitcoin Core binaries as described in the blog post, except I have built both containers myself by utilizing multi-stage builds. This minimizes the amount of data Docker has to pull upon container startup. This is about 30 MB per container. Container configuration can be found from vtorhonen/lightning-node and from my Dockerhub registries:

Prequisites

Install Ansible to your control machine. Tested with version 2.7.7.

Running locally

If you want to test all this locally first you can do so by first installing:

Vagrant
VirtualBox

Then run vagrant up. Note that this creates a data directory to your cwd. You probably don't want to sync the whole Bitcoin blockchain this way, but at least you can verify that the automation works for running bitcoind.

Testing with a fleet of machines

Deploy a fleet of Debian hosts. Tested with Debian versions stretch and buster. Make sure you have plenty of storage space available under /data directory on each host. This playbook expects that.

Next create a file at provisioning/inventories/lnd-nodes.yml and define your target hosts. See provisioning/inventories/example.yml for reference.

Installing bitcoind nodes

First run the playbook deploy-bitcoind.yml, which installs Docker and runs the Bitcoin Core container.

$ ansible-playbook -i provisioning/inventories/lnd-nodes.yml deploy-bitcoind.yml

You now have a Bitcoin Core node running, which exposes itself to the network through port tcp/8333. Node start synchronizing the blockchain. Use the following command to see it's progress.

$ ansible all -b -i provisioning/inventories/lnd-nodes.yml -a "docker logs --tail=1 bitcoind"
foohost | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
2018-02-02 20:15:07 UpdateTip: new best=0000000000000007b4511e0e0fe84f191bf6451e2e31e33da5445ec298e40c6c
height=263627 version=0x00000002 log2_work=72.758038 tx=25379178 date='2013-10-14 16:04:00'
progress=0.086696 cache=570.9MiB(4120711txo)

A wrapper script is installed at /usr/local/bin/bitcoin-cli, which you can use to send commands to the RPC interface of the node.

$ ansible all -b -i provisioning/inventories/lnd-nodes.yml -a "bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo"
foohost | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
{
  "version": 160300,
  "subversion": "/Satoshi:0.16.3/",
  "protocolversion": 70015,
  "localservices": "000000000000040d",
  "localrelay": true,
  "timeoffset": -1,
  "networkactive": true,
  "connections": 29,
  "networks": [ ... ]
}

Installing lightning network nodes

Once the Bitcoin blockchain is synchronized you can deploy a c-lightning Lightning Network daemon. It shares the same Docker network configuration with the Bitcoin node and is exposed to the network through port tcp/9735.

$ ansible-playbook -i provisioning/inventories/lnd-nodes.yml deploy-lnd.yml

A similar wrapper script is installed at /usr/local/bin/lightning-cli.

$ ansible all -b -i provisioning/inventories/lnd-nodes.yml -a "lightning-cli getinfo"
foohost | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
{ "id" : "", "port" : 9735, "address" :
	[  ], "version" : "v0.6.1", "blockheight" : 543607, "network" : "bitcoin" }