core-lightning/cln-grpc
Matt Whitlock 8d737cc4bf Makefile: use grouped targets for recipes with multiple fixed outputs
See the section headed "Rules with Grouped Targets" on the Texinfo page
`(make)Multiple Targets`.

Without this fix, Make does not know that these recipes unconditionally
make *all* of their named targets regardless of which target triggers
their execution, and Make will blissfully execute multiple instances of
any such recipe in parallel, not only wasting CPU cycles but potentially
producing incorrect results if the recipe is not atomic in its effects
on the file system.  With this fix, Make understands that it need only
execute such a recipe once to make all of its targets.

In pursuit of the above, move and combine two redundant msggen recipes
into the top-level Makefile, and populate its grouped targets from the
subordinate Makefiles.

Changelog-None
2023-06-23 13:58:31 +09:30
..
proto msggen: Extend support range to v0.10.1 and mark address, added in v23.02 2023-06-13 11:28:35 +09:30
src msggen: Extend support range to v0.10.1 and mark address, added in v23.02 2023-06-13 11:28:35 +09:30
build.rs grpc: Add the experimental optional flag to protoc 2022-11-18 15:10:32 +01:00
Cargo.toml rs: Guard the cln-rpc dependency behind "server" feature in cln-grpc 2023-06-01 13:41:21 +09:30
Makefile Makefile: use grouped targets for recipes with multiple fixed outputs 2023-06-23 13:58:31 +09:30
README.md Update README.md 2022-07-03 12:41:07 +02:00

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 itll 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.