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CLBOSS The Core Lightning Node Manager

CLBOSS is an automated manager for Core Lightning forwarding nodes.

CLBOSS is effectively a bunch of heuristics modules wired together to a regular clock to continuously monitor your node.

Its design goal is to make it so that running a Lightning Network node is as simple as installing Core Lightning and CLBOSS, putting some amount of funds of 0.1BTC or more, and making sure you have continuous Internet and power to the hardware running it.

Current versions of CLBOSS might not achieve this goal yet perfectly, but hopefully with enough effort and iteration and raw coding and etc etc it will someday be as unusual to manually manage a Lightning node as writing (as opposed to reading) machine language is unusual today.

I hope CLBOSS can make the transition from pre-Lightning to post-Lightning much smoother in practice.

So far CLBOSS can do the following automatically:

  • Open channels to other, useful nodes when fees are low and there are onchain funds
  • Acquire incoming capacity via boltz.exchange swaps.
  • Rebalance open channels by self-payment (including JIT rebalancer).
  • Set forwarding fees so that they're competitive to other nodes

You can read more information about CLBOSS here: https://zmnscpxj.github.io/clboss/index.html As of this release, this page is a work in progress, stay tuned for updates!

Dependencies

If you are installing from some official source release tarball, you only need the below packages installed.

Debian-derived systems:

  • build-essential
  • pkg-config
  • libev-dev
  • libcurl4-gnutls-dev
  • libsqlite3-dev
  • libunwind-dev

RPM-dervied :

  • groupinstall "Development Tools"
  • pkg-config
  • libev-devel
  • libcurl-devel
  • libsqlite3x-devel
  • libunwind-devel

Alpine:

  • build-base
  • pkgconf
  • libev-dev
  • curl-dev
  • sqlite-dev
  • libunwind-dev

Equivalent packages have a good probability of existing in non-Debian-derived distributions as well.

The following dependency is technically optional, but is strongly recommended (CLBOSS will check it at runtime so you do not need it while building):

  • dnsutils

For alpine linux the package is: bind-tools.

If you have to build directly from github.com, you need the below Debian/RPM/Alpine packages in addition:

  • git
  • automake
  • autoconf-archive
  • libtool

A design goal of CLBOSS is to reduce the above dependencies even further.

Installing

From an official source release, just:

./configure && make
sudo make install # or su first, then make install

This will install clboss as a standard executable, usually in /usr/local/bin/ by default. You will then need to modify your lightning.conf to add the path to which clboss as a plugin or important-plugin of lightningd.

Usually, autotools-based projects like CLBOSS will default to using -g -O2 for compilation flags, where -g causes the compiler to include debug info. CLBOSS changes this default to -O2 so that users by default get a binary without debug symbols (a binary with debug symbols would be 20x larger!), but if it matters to you, you can override the CLBOSS default via CXXFLAGS, such as:

./configure CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"  # or whatever flags you like
./configure CXXFLAGS="-g -Og"  # recommended for debugging

And if your build machine has more than 1 core, you probably want to pass in the -j option to make, too:

make -j4  # or how many cores you want to build on

From a git clone, you first need to execute:

autoreconf -i

Then run the ./configure && make && sudo make install.

You can then add a plugin=/path/to/clboss or important-plugin=/path/to/clboss setting to your Core Lightning configuration file.

FreeBSD

The following packages as of 12.2-RELEASE are necessary when building, whether from git clone or from official source release:

pkg install curl
pkg install gmake
pkg install libev
pkg install pkgconf
pkg install sqlite3
pkg install libunwind

In addition, you have to use gmake for building, not the system make, as the included libsecp256k1 requires gmake.

./configure && gmake
sudo gmake install # or su first, then gmake install

You need to install the below first before you can run autoreconf -i sucessfully on a git clone.

pkg install autoconf-archive
pkg install autotools
pkg install git

While releases and pre-releases will be tested for compileability in a FreeBSD VM, git master may transiently be in a state where the default CLANG may raise warnings that are not raised by GCC, or may refer to Linux-specific header files and functions.

Nix

If you are a Nix user for developments you are use nix to build clboss, and to get started you need nix flake activated on your machine and then run the following command:

nix develop
autoreconf -i
./configure && make

Contributed Utilities

There are some contributed utilities in the contrib directory. See the contrib/README.md for more details.

Operating

A goal of CLBOSS is that you never have to monitor or check your node, or CLBOSS, at all.

Nevertheless, CLBOSS exposes a few commands and options as well. Many of them are undocumented commands for internal testing, but some may be of interest to curious node operators, or those who have special use-cases.

clboss-status

This simply displays a bunch of status about a few of the modules CLBOSS has. Possibly the most interesting are these:

  • channel_candidates - An array of nodes that we plan to eventually build channels to in the future, if we ever get onchain funds. onlineness only reaches up to 24 and saturates. Candidates are generally scored by the uptime they appear to have (CLBOSS tries to connect to them).
  • internet - Whether CLBOSS thinks we are online or offline right now. We generally check connectivity every 10 minutes, so you could be offline for shorter than that before CLBOSS notices. CLBOSS does not perform uptime measurements on other nodes if we are offline.
  • onchain_feerate - Sampled onchain feerate for normal, as well as whether CLBOSS currently thinks we are in a low-feerate or high-feerate time period. Also displayed is the various thresholds. If CLBOSS is in high fees judgment, then if sampled feerates fall below hi_to_lo it switches to low fees. Vice versa, if it is in low fees it switches to high fees if feerates go above lo_to_hi. init_mid is the boundary used when CLBOSS starts up. CLBOSS tries to hold off on onchain activity (e.g. opening channels, swapping offchain funds to onchain addresses) during high fee periods except in extremis (e.g. you have no channels at all, or you have no or very little incoming liquidity).
  • peer_metrics - Various metrics on nodes we currently have channels to. Possibly the most interesting is connect_rate, which is the uptime we think they have. age is in seconds. The metrics shown are for the last 3 days, though CLBOSS stores the raw statistics for the past two months.

clboss-externpay

If CLBOSS is managing a node for a custodial service, then you should decodepay the invoices provided by clients whose funds you are custodying, and pass the payment_hash as the sole argument to clboss-externpay.

CLBOSS gathers data for statistics by also monitoring pay commands. If pay tries to route to a payee via a peer, but the payment fails, CLBOSS considers it a failing of that peer, which should really be monitoring its own peers and consider them bad and close channels with them if delivering by those fails too often, with the logic applied transitively (so even a remote failure is always blamed on the first hop, because it should be monitoring its own next hops, which should be monitoring their own next hops...).

Knowing that CLBOSS does this, a client of a custodial service can craft an unredeemable invoice in order to mess with those statistics, making a particular peer of the custodial service appear to be failing.

clboss-externpay closes this attack by specifically ignoring payments that match the given payment_hash.

You should not use it when paying invoices to your employees or stakeholders, as presumably those have incentives aligned with you. Presumably they want to get paid, so would give you invoices they can redeem perfectly well.

clboss-ignore-onchain, clboss-notice-onchain

Suppose you have the following story:

  • You want to pay to some onchain address.
  • All your funds are locked in Lightning channels on an LN node managed with CLBOSS.

Here is another user story:

  • You have a popular Core Lightning forwarding node that you are happily not managing because you are using CLBOSS The Automated Core Lightning Node Manager.
  • A friend asks a favor to get some incoming liquidity.
    • You should really talk them into running Core Lightning and CLBOSS themselves to get incoming liquidity
  • You decide to help them out and give them some capacity.
  • You take some funds from cold storage and send it onchain to your Core Lightning node.
  • CLBOSS is so awesome, it takes those onchain funds and puts them into channels it has chosen rather than channels you wanted to choose.
  • You end up not being able to help your friend.
    • At this point you talk them into running Core Lightning and CLBOSS.

To help with these user stories, CLBOSS provides the clboss-ignore-onchain command. After executing this command, CLBOSS will temporarily ignore onchain funds (with the side effect that it will not try to get its own incoming liquidity by moving offchain funds to onchain addresses, since those funds would end up being ignored by CLBOSS instead of being managed). CLBOSS will continue to rebalance your offchain funds, monitor peers, check that channel candidates have high uptime, look for new channel candidates, manage channel fees, and so on.

Then, you can perform onchain actions manually, such as moving cold storage into your Lightning node and making a channel manually for a friend, or closing some LN channels and withdrawing those funds to an onchain address.

clboss-ignore-onchain accepts an optional hours argument, a number of hours that it will ignore onchain funds. If not specified, this defaults to 24 hours. You can specify this again at a later time to extend the ignore time if needed.

Once you have completed any manual onchain funds management, you can run clboss-notice-onchain in order to let CLBOSS resume normal operation. In any case, clboss-ignore-onchain is temporary and even if you forget to issue clboss-notice-onchain CLBOSS will resume managing onchain funds at some point.

clboss-unmanage

Continuing with the previous user story, suppose after the channel has been established, as a favor to your friend you decide not to charge LN fees towards their node.

Normally CLBOSS will automatically manage LN fees for every channel. To suppress this, you can use the clboss-unmanage command, which has two parameters, nodeid and tags.

lightning-cli clboss-unmanage ${NODEID} lnfee

After the above command, you can set the fee manually with the normal Core Lightning setchannelfee command.

The second parameter, tags, is a string containing a comma-separated set of unmanagement tags. For example, you can require that opening channels to a particular node is done only by your manual intervention, even if CLBOSS decides later that opening channels to that node is a good idea, and also require that CLBOSS not set channel fees automatically:

lightning-cli clboss-unmanage ${NODEID} lnfee,open

To resume full management of the node, give an empty string:

lightning-cli clboss-unmanage ${NODEID} ""

The possible unmanagement tags are:

  • lnfee - Do not manage the channel fee of channels to this node.
  • open - Do not automatically open channels to this node.
  • close - Do not automatically close channels to this node.
  • balance - Do not automatically move funds (rebalance) to or from this node.

clboss-swaps

CLBOSS will sometimes swap Lightning funds for onchain funds, and then put the onchain funds into new channels. This is generally done to acquire incoming capacity for a new node, or if incoming capacity got closed.

This swapping is done via various online swap providers. These providers charge for this swap service.

The clboss-swaps command provides the list of offchain-to-onchain swaps, including how much was disbursed and how much got returned in the swap.

This recording only started in 0.11D. Earlier versions do not record, so if you have been using CLBOSS before 0.11D, then historical offchain-to-onchain swaps are not reported.

clboss-recent-earnings, clboss-earnings-history

As of CLBOSS version [TBD], earnings and expenditures are tracked on a daily basis. The following commands have been added to observe the new data:

  • clboss-recent-earnings:

    • Purpose: Returns a data structure equivalent to the offchain_earnings_tracker collection in clboss-status, but only includes recent earnings and expenditures.
    • Arguments:
      • days (optional): Specifies the number of days to include in the report. Defaults to a fortnight (14 days) if not provided.

  • clboss-earnings-history:

    • Purpose: Provides a daily breakdown of earnings and expenditures.
    • Arguments:
      • nodeid (optional): Limits the history to a particular node if provided. Without this argument, the values are accumulated across all peers.
    • Output:
      • The history consists of an array of records showing the earnings and expenditures for each day.
      • The history includes an initial record with a time value of 0, which contains any legacy earnings and expenditures collected by CLBOSS before daily tracking was implemented.

These commands enhance the tracking of financial metrics, allowing for detailed and recent analysis of earnings and expenditures on a daily basis.

--clboss-min-onchain=<satoshis>

Pass this option to lightningd in order to specify a target amount that CLBOSS will leave onchain. The amount specified must be an ordinary number, and must be in satoshis unit, without any trailing units or other strings.

The default is "30000", or about 0.0003 BTC. The intent is that this minimal amount will be used in the future, by Core Lightning, to manage anchor-commitment channels, or post-Taproot Decker-Russell-Osuntokun channels. These channel types need some small amount of onchain funds to unilaterally close, so it is not recommended to set it to 0.

The amount specified is a ballpark figure, and CLBOSS may leave slightly lower or slightly higher than this amount.

--clboss-auto-close=<true|false>

This version of CLBOSS has EXPERIMENTAL code to monitor channels and close them if they are not good for your earnings.

This monitoring can be seen in clboss-status, under the peer_complaints and closed_peer_complaints keys.

As this feature is experimental, it is currently disabled by default. You can enable it by adding clboss-auto-close=true in your lightningd configuration. Even if it is disabled, this monitoring is still performed and reported in clboss-status, channels are simply not actually closed, but most of the algorithm is still running (so you can evaluate yourself if you agree with it and maybe enable it yourself later).

Even if you have auto-closing enabled, you can use the clboss-unmanage command with key close to ensure that particular channels to particular nodes will not be auto-closed by CLBOSS (they may still be closed by lightningd due to an HTLC timeout, or by the peer for any reason, or by you; this just suppresses CLBOSS).

--clboss-zerobasefee=<require|allow|disallow>

Pass this option to lightningd to specify how this node will advertise its base_fee.

  • require - the base_fee must be always 0.
  • allow - if the heuristics of CLBOSS think it might be a good idea to set base_fee to 0, let it be 0, but otherwise set it to whatever value the heuristics want.
  • disallow - the base_fee must always be non-0. If the heuristics think it might be good to set it to 0, set it to 1 instead.

On 0.11C and earlier, CLBOSS had the disallow behavior. In this version, the default is the allow behavior.

Some pathfinding algorithms under development may strongly prefer 0 or low base fees, so you might want to set CLBOSS to 0 base fee, or to allow a 0 base fee.

--clboss-min-channel=<satoshis> / --clboss-max-channel=<satoshis>

Sets the minimum and maximum channel sizes that CLBOSS will make.

The defaults are:

  • Minimum: 500000sats = 5mBTC
  • Maximum: 16777215sats = 167.77215mBTC

Specify the value in satoshis without adding any unit suffix, e.g.

lightningd --clboss-min-channel=1000000

clboss-recent-earnings, clboss-earnings-history

As of CLBOSS version 0.14, earnings and expenditures are tracked on a daily basis. The following commands have been added to observe the new data:

  • clboss-recent-earnings:

    • Purpose: Returns a data structure equivalent to the offchain_earnings_tracker collection in clboss-status, but only includes recent earnings and expenditures.
    • Arguments:
      • days (optional): Specifies the number of days to include in the report. Defaults to a fortnight (14 days) if not provided.

  • clboss-earnings-history:

    • Purpose: Provides a daily breakdown of earnings and expenditures.
    • Arguments:
      • nodeid (optional): Limits the history to a particular node if provided. Without this argument, the history is accumulated across all nodes.
    • Output:
      • The history consists of an array of records showing the earnings and expenditures for each day.
      • The history includes an initial record with a time value of 0, which contains any legacy earnings and expenditures collected by CLBOSS before daily tracking was implemented.

These commands enhance the tracking of financial metrics, allowing for detailed and recent analysis of earnings and expenditures on a daily basis.