LightningTip

A simple way to accept tips via the Lightning Network on your website. If want to tip me you can find my instance of LightningTip here.

robclark56 forked LightningTip and rewrote the backend in PHP. His fork is called LightningTip-PHP and is a great alternative if you are not able to run the executable.

How to install

To get all necessary files for setting up LightningTip you can either download a prebuilt version or compile from source.

LightningTip is using LND as backend. Please make sure it is installed and fully synced before you install LightningTip.

The default config file location is $HOME/.lightningtip/lightningTip.conf. The sample config contains everything you need to know about the configuration. To use a custom config file location use the flag --config filename. You can use all keys in the config as command line flag. Command line flags always override values in the config.

The next step is embedding LightningTip on your website. Upload all files excluding lightningTip.html to your webserver. Copy the contents of the head tag from lightningTip.html into the head section of the HTML file you want to show LightningTip in. The div below the head tag is LightningTip itself. Paste it into any place in the already edited HTML file on your server.

There is a light theme available for LightningTip. If you want to use it add this to the head tag of your HTML file:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="lightningTip_light.css">

Do not use LightningTip on XHTML sites. That causes some weird scaling issues.

Make sure that the executable of LightningTip is always running in the background. It is an API to connect LND and the widget on your website. Do not open the URL you are running LightingTip on in your browser. All this will do is show an error.

If you are not running LightningTip on the same domain or IP address as your webserver, or not on port 8081, change the variable requestUrl (which is in the first line) in the file lightningTip.js accordingly.

When using LightningTip behind a proxy make sure the proxy supports EventSource. Without support for it the users will not see the "Thank you for your tip!" screen.

That's it! The only two things you need to take care about is keeping the LND node online and making sure that your incoming channels are sufficiently funded to receive tips. LightningTip will take care of everything else.

How to build

First of all make sure Golang version 1.11 or newer is correctly installed.

go get -d github.com/michael1011/lightningtip
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/michael1011/lightningtip

make && make install

To start run $GOPATH/bin/lightningtip or follow the instructions below to setup a service to run LightningTip automatically.

Upgrading

Make sure you stop any running LightningTip process before upgrading, then pull from source as follows:

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/michael1011/lightningtip
git pull

make && make install

Starting LightningTip Automatically

LightningTip can be started automatically via Systemd, or Supervisord, as outlined in the following wiki documentation:

• Running LightningTip with systemd
• Running LightningTip with supervisord

Reverse Proxy Recipes

In instances where the default LightningTip SSL configuration options are not working, you may want to explore running a reverse proxy to LightningTip as outlined in the following wiki documentation:

• LightningTip via Apache2 reverse proxy
• LightningTip via Nginx reverse proxy