core-lightning/cln-grpc
Rusty Russell c3f33eb6dd listpeerchannels: show gossip updates.
This is redundant if it's a public channel, but vital if it's not.  Publishing unconditionally makes
it easier for gossmap: we create a local modification all the time, even if redundant (and we can
have the actual capacity ceiling accurate in this case, since we know it for local channels).

Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>

Changelog-Added: JSON-RPC: `listpeerchannels` now shows gossip update contents (even if channel unannounced).
2023-12-14 09:16:56 +10:30
..
proto listpeerchannels: show gossip updates. 2023-12-14 09:16:56 +10:30
src listpeerchannels: show gossip updates. 2023-12-14 09:16:56 +10:30
build.rs grpc: Add the experimental optional flag to protoc 2022-11-18 15:10:32 +01:00
Cargo.toml rs: Fix up grpc conversions 2023-10-24 10:24:52 +10:30
Makefile Makefile: correctly erase generated contrib/pyln-testing/pyln/testing/ in distclean, and rebuild by default. 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.