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core-lightning/cln-grpc
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Christian Decker 8898511cf6 cln-plugin: Defer binding the plugin state until after configuring 
We had a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, where we instantiated the
`state` to be managed by the `Plugin` during the very first step when
creating the `Builder`, but then the state might depend on the
configuration we only get later. This would force developers to add
placeholders in the form of `Option` into the state, when really
they'd never be none after configuring.

This defers the binding until after we get the configuration and
cleans up the semantics:

 - `Builder`: declare options, hooks, etc
 - `ConfiguredPlugin`: we have exchanged the handshake with
   `lightningd`, now we can construct the `state` accordingly
 - `Plugin`: Running instance of the plugin

Changelog-Changed: cln-plugin: Moved the state binding to the plugin until after the configuration step
2022-09-25 15:13:12 +02:00
..
proto lightningd: listsendpays always has groupid. 2022-09-22 15:19:46 +02:00
src cln-plugin: Defer binding the plugin state until after configuring 2022-09-25 15:13:12 +02:00
build.rs cln-grpc: Generate grpc bindings from proto 2022-02-28 23:25:37 +00:00
Cargo.toml cln-grpc: Add conversion test for listpeers 2022-04-02 09:46:01 +10:30
Makefile cln-grpc: Generate server dispatcher 2022-02-28 23:25:37 +00:00
README.md Update README.md 2022-07-03 12:41:07 +02:00

README.md

cln-grpc - Secure Networked RPC Interface

This plugin provides a standardized API that apps, plugins, and other tools could use to interact with Core Lightning. We always had a JSON-RPC, with a very exhaustive API, but it was exposed only locally over a Unix-domain socket. Some plugins chose to re-expose the API over a variety of protocols, ranging from REST to gRPC, but it was additional work to install them.

So with v0.11.0, we released a new interface: cln-grpc, a Rust-based plugin that exposes the existing interface over the network in a secure manner. The gRPC API is automatically generated from our existing JSON-RPC API, so it has the same low-level and high-level access that app devs are accustomed to but uses a more efficient binary encoding where possible and is secured via mutual TLS authentication.

To use it, just add the --grpc-port option, and it’ll automatically start alongside Core Lightning and generate the appropriate mTLS certificates. To use the gRPC interface, copy the client key and certificate, generate your client bindings from the protobuf definition and connect to the port you specified earlier.

While all previous built-in plugins were written in C, the cln-grpc plugin is written in Rust, a language that will be much more prominent in the project going forward. In order to kick off the use of Rust, we also built a number of crates:

  • cln-rpc: native bindings to the JSON-RPC interface, used for things running on the same system as CLN.
  • cln-plugin: a library that facilitates the creation of plugins in Rust, with async/await support, for low-footprint plugins.
  • cln-grpc: of course, the library used to create the gRPC plugin can also be used directly as a client library.

All of these crates are published on crates.io and will be maintained as part of the project moving forward.