Plugins

Power up your Core Lightning node and tailor it for your business needs with community built plugins.

Reckless plugin manager

reckless is a plugin manager for Core Lightning that you can use to install and uninstall plugins with a single command.

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Reckless currently supports python plugins only. Additional language support will be provided in future releases. For plugins built by the community in other languages, see the complete list of plugins here.

Typical plugin installation involves: finding the source plugin, copying, installing dependencies, testing, activating, and updating the lightningd config file. Reckless does all of these by invoking:

reckless install plugin_name

reckless will exit early in the event that:

• the plugin is not found in any available source repositories
• dependencies are not sucessfully installed
• the plugin fails to execute

Reckless-installed plugins reside in the 'reckless' subdirectory of the user's .lightning folder. By default, plugins are activated on the bitcoin network (and use lightningd's bitcoin network config), but regtest may also be used.

Other commands include:

Disable the plugin, remove the directory:

reckless uninstall plugin_name

Look through all available sources for a plugin matching this name:

reckless search plugin_name

Dynamically enable the reckless-installed plugin and update the config to match:

reckless enable plugin_name

Dynamically disable the reckless-installed plugin and update the config to match:

reckless disable plugin_name

List available plugin repositories:

reckless source list

Add another plugin repo for reckless to search:

reckless source add repo_url

Remove a plugin repo for reckless to search:

reckless source rm repo_url

Options

Available option flags:

-d, --reckless-dir reckless_dir
specify an alternative data directory for reckless to use.
Useful if your .lightning is protected from execution.

-l, --lightning lightning_data_dir
lightning data directory (defaults to $USER/.lightning)

-c, --conf lightning_config
pass the config used by lightningd

-r, --regtest
use the regtest network and config instead of bitcoin mainnet

-v, --verbose
request additional debug output

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Running the first time will prompt the user that their lightningd's bitcoin config will be appended (or created) to inherit the reckless config file (this config is specific to bitcoin by default.) Management of plugins will subsequently modify this file.

Troubleshooting

Plugins must be executable. For python plugins, the shebang is invoked, so python3 should be available in your environment. This can be verified with which Python3. The default reckless directory is $USER/.lightning/reckless and it should be possible for the lightningd user to execute files located here. If this is a problem, the option flag reckless -d=<my_alternate_dir> may be used to relocate the reckless directory from its default. Consider creating a permanent alias in this case.