[feat]: Support External Funding Sources

[danielcharrua]

Prerequisites

• I have searched for existing issues that already report this problem.

Device

Laptop/Desktop

Device OS

MacOS

Device OS Version

12.7.3

Browser

Safari

Browser Version

17.3

Current Behavior

After updating from v0.12.4 to v0.12.5 all lnbits server config and accounts are lost.
I have first discovered this in the properties tab, the accounts were lost and the superuser password changed. Then I tried to login with an old account and got a 401 error (account does not exist).
Checked later the funding and server config and all was lost 😔

Expected Behavior

Maintain all lnbits server config and accounts after upgrading to a new version.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Have installed v0.12.4
2. Do some config in lnbits and created accounts
3. Update to v0.12.5
4. All config and accounts are lost

Anything else?

No response

[Dominion5254]

I am not able to reproduce following the described steps. Changing the config LN Implementation i.e. LND -> CLN or vice versa would explain the described behavior - did you happen to change this config between step 2 and 4?

If not, sharing the LNbits logs would be helpful in understanding why this might have occurred.

[danielcharrua]

I did not change LND -> CLN or vice versa... As I'm using an external funding wallet I have disabled LND...
LND must be running even using an external funding source?

[Dominion5254]

To confirm, you manually added an external funding source in the admin UI? If so, this would be expected.

The LNbits package on StartOS hasn't been setup/tested to accommodate funding sources outside of LND or CLN running on the same StartOS Server.

Supporting external LN nodes could be a feature added in the future, but I wouldn't expect this to work at preset.

[danielcharrua]

Yes,

• Installed LNbits and LND, then entered the LNbits admin and added an external funding wallet.
• Generated a normal user in LNbits and created an invoice... Also payed for it and no problems.
• In some moment I disabled LND because I was using external funding and thought that was not necessary.
• Then updated LNbits from v0.12.4 to v0.12.5 and all config was erased (users, server config, superuser password)
• Tried to config again and install some extensions and errors were shown, errors saying that SQL databases were already created before. So in some way the update found data.
• Erased completely LNbits and installed again.

I was not aware that LNbits in Start9 can't run with external funding wallets, why is that? is there any docs saying features that run or not run?

Thank you!

[Dominion5254]

The documentation for LNbits can be found here. "Start by ensuring that you have LNbits installed already as well as LND or Core Lightning (CLN)." - the implication here is LND or CLN is installed on the same server. But if that is not apparent we can amend the docs to be more explicit.

In general a service release on StartOS will include the most common/requested use cases of the upstream service.

As to why external funding wallets are not currently supported: dev resources are generally applied first toward highly requested service features. To my knowledge this is the first time a StartOS user has requested external node support for LNbits. This doesn't mean it won't be implemented at some point, but it may require more time and/or demand from users before it is implemented. And as always with open source, community members are welcome to contribute with PRs.

[danielcharrua]

All understood!

Some days ago I've discovered that LNbits was accepting external funding sources in their support chat.. So that's why I was trying to use this feature. That for some strange reason worked in v0.12.4 under StartOS... but not in v0.12.5.

I think this is useful as no need for spinning a Lightning node, managing channels, inbound liquidity... I know that this has some privacy and security issues on funds as we know that we are using third party custodial services. But is so easy to setup, and in one minute yo are using LNbits with Alby for example.

Hope some members will find this useful and vote for it.
Is there anything I can test to be sure why this is disabled or failing? I'm not an expert but I can test.

Thank you @Dominion5254

[Dominion5254]

I believe the db being reset is not directly related to updating from v0.12.4 to v0.12.5, but rather restarting the lnbits service which happens after update, and then runs the docker_entrypoint.sh script.

Every time the service starts there is a conditional in this script comparing the LN Implementation in Config with the database; if they do not match the db is reset so the user is starting with a fresh node using the internal LN node specified in Config. I suspect that something related to the external node resulted in the DB not matching Config and the DB being reset as a result.

If you have logs going back to when you updated LNbits to v0.12.5 there should be some entries that validate this hypothesis (line 27 and 28 of docker_entrypoint.sh).

[remcoros]

I've submitted #42. It doesn't allow external funding sources, but at least prevents the user from changing it through the LNBits admin UI. And it backups/restores the sqlite database when switching between lnd/cln.