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Overview

Before diving into the specifics, let's first define a number of concepts that will be useful once we start developing:

Nodes

Greenlight provisions and manages Core Lightning nodes on behalf of its users. The nodes expose the grpc interface defined in the cln-grpc proto file, without limitations. The goal of this guide is to spin up a node and interact with it as if it were a local Core Lightning node.

Authentication

All communication channels in Greenlight are authenticated and encrypted via mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security), similar to HTTPS in the browser. Each client receives its own identity in the form of a private key and matching certificate, which can then be used to authenticate and encrypt communication when talking with Greenlight.

In this guide we will be using two identities:

  • nobody: An identity that is shipped with the library, used to communicate with services that don't require authentication.
  • A Device Identity: A unique identity used by the application to authenticate with the Greenlight. The private key is generated and kept locally, and certified by Greenlight to belong to a given node.

See the security page for more details about how the authentication works.

Signer

The signer manages any private information, is used to prove node ownership when registering and recovering, and processes signature requests from the node. It is initialized with the secret seed (a 32 byte secret), the bitcoin network the node runs on, and the identity to use when communicating with the node.

See the security page for details on how the signer ensures that operations it signs off originate from an authenticated app.

Scheduler

Greenlight nodes are scheduled on-demand when a client needs to talk to it. The Scheduler tracks which nodes are running where, and starts them if they aren't running yet. You can think of it as just a mechanism to register new nodes and look up where they are running.

Certificate

You will need a secret certificate to register nodes on the Greenlight service. Create an account on the Greenlight Developer Console, download the zip file and follow the instructions on how to use it in your application.