pylightning-qt

bitcoin-qt for C-Lightning, as simple as : lightning-cli gui

What is it ?

lightning-qt is a Python plugin for C-lightning, a Lightning Network daemon. It enables the use of a bitcoin-qt-like Graphical User Interface (actually, part of the icons and forms have been taken from bitcoin-qt and modified) via the RPC interface.

Why ?

Currently lightning does not have a GUI, and I think that having one which looks like bitcoin-qt is great for people coming from bitcoin-core, which most of the C-Lightning users do (or have at least ever used bitcoin-qt). Having it directly available from the RPC is also quite convenient.

How to install it ?

The easiest way is to install it with bug :-). If you have lightningd running with the bug plugin loaded you can install lightning-qt with :

lightning-cli install_plugin lightning-qt

Otherwise the traditional solution :

git clone https://github.com/darosior/lightning-qt && cd lightning-qt
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
chmod a+x lightning-qt.py
# And just start lightningd like
lightningd --plugin=lightning-qt.py

You can also add lightning-qt directly in the default plugins directory so that it is automatically loaded on startup :

git clone https://github.com/darosior/lightning-qt ~/.lightning/plugins/lightning-qt
python3 -m pip install ~/.lightning/plugins/lightning-qt/requirements.txt
chmod a+x ~/.lightning/plugins/lightning-qt/lightning-qt.py
lightningd

Or you can even start it dynamically like (C-lightning v0.7.2 and above) :

git clone https://github.com/darosior/lightning-qt && cd lightning-qt
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
chmod a+x lightning-qt.py
# And just start lightningd like
lightning-cli plugin start lightning-qt.py

For more informations about plugins and their installations you can checkout the lightningd/plugins repository (which has a great list of plugins too).

How to use it ?

Just launch lightning-cli gui :D.
You can now also use lightning-qt in standalone mode. It will connect to a socket which path can be given as a command line option (and defaults to $HOME/.lightning/lightning-rpc) : this can be useful to use lightning-qt as a remote control for your lightning node hosted on another computer, you could for example share a socket through ssh and start lightning-qt listening on this socket i.e.

python3 lightning-qt --socket-path /path/to/unixdomain/socket

Contributing

Any contribution (issue, PR) is welcome. We use forms(ui files) to design pages : these are handled by PyQt5 with the pyuic5 command line tool (installed with pip install PyQt5). If you modify a ui file (you may want to use QDesigner), you can regenerate the Python code like :

pyuic5 forms/channelspage.ui -o forms/ui_channelsPage.py

Images are handled in the qrc file : if you modify this resource file (for instance to add an image/icon), you can regenerate the Python code with :

pyrcc5 gui.qrc -o resources.py

Also, if you help me on this project you may want to use the very handy auto-reload plugin. Please also note that PyQt5 has a very bad way to handle exception in slots : in short you cannot except a raised exception in a slot, so be carefull and happy debuging ;).

Licence

BSD 3-clauses clear