Faraday

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Time: 5 minutes

Faraday is an accounting tool for Lightning and on-chain. Useful, because you're always losing sats on things like transaction fees that often go unnoticed. Among other things, it offers the possibility to create a printout to CSV format.

Requirements

  • Golang (update to the latest version before you start).

Installation

Navigate to your home directory.

cd ~

Download the source code.

git clone https://github.com/lightninglabs/faraday

Go to the faraday directory.

cd faraday

Grab the latest version/tag/release.

git checkout v0.2.11-alpha

Install the faraday software.

make && make install

There are two tools that have been installed: faraday and frcli. Faraday is the program itself and frcli is a way to communicate with Faraday. Test both to see if installation was successful.

faraday --version
frcli --version

You can go a step further by starting Faraday with the correct settings. In the text below, in the spots "FILL_USERNAME_IN" and "FILL_PASSWORD_IN" you need to enter the data you created during the configuration of Knots.

faraday --lnd.macaroondir=/home/ubuntu/.lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet --lnd.tlscertpath=/home/ubuntu/.lnd/tls.cert --lnd.rpcserver=127.0.0.1:10009 --connect_bitcoin --bitcoin.host=127.0.0.1:8332 --bitcoin.user=ENTER_USERNAME_HERE--bitcoin.password=ENTER_PASSWORD_HERE

Once you see that everything is working, you can close faraday again with Ctrl + C.

Firewall

You can access faraday via gRPC on port 8465.

sudo ufw allow 8465 comment "Port for Faraday"

Automation

Automating Faraday cannot be done very neatly. This is due to the fact that Faraday does not use a configuration file that contains the settings. Instead, you have to pass all the settings along at startup.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/faraday.service

Paste this in.

[Unit]
Description=Faraday
Requires=lnd.service
After=lnd.service
[Service]
User=ubuntu
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/go/bin/faraday --lnd.macaroondir=/home/ubuntu/.lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet --lnd.tlscertpath=/home/ubuntu/.lnd/tls. cert --lnd.rpcserver=127.0.0.1:10009 --connect_bitcoin --bitcoin.host=127.0.0.1:8332 --bitcoin.user=ENTER_USERNAME_HERE--bitcoin.password=ENTER_PASSWORD_HERE
Restart=always
TimeoutSec=120
RestartSec=30
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save the changes with Ctrl + X and confirm with Y.

Notify the system of the new service.

sudo systemctl enable faraday

Start the Faraday service as follows.

sudo systemctl start faraday

If you want to see if the service is started, run this.

systemctl status faraday

If you want a view of the status across multiple sessions, use this command.

sudo journalctl -f -u faraday

Updating

Go to the application directory.

cd ~/faraday

Update the repository with the latest changes via Git.

git fetch --all

Show the latest version/tag/release.

git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`

Retrieve the changes from the latest release.

git checkout -f <OUTPUT FROM PREVIOUS STEP> #e.g. v0.2.11-alpha

Install the faraday software.

make && make install

Restart the faraday and LiT services (if you have that running).

sudo systemctl restart faraday
sudo systemctl restart lit