Common Rust Lightning Network types

Warning: while in a good state, this is still considered a preview version! There are some planned changes.

This library aims to provide Rust-idiomatic, ergonomic, and reasonably performant implementation of primitives used in applications interacting with Lightning Network. That means, they are not just types used to implement LN itself, they are supposed to be useful to any application that e.g. communicates with an LN implementation. Of course, they should still be useful for an LN implementation itself.

Important types

The most important types currently available:

• Amount - similar to bitcoin::Amount but with millisatoshi precision
• P2PAddress - address of a node usually represented in text as node_id_hex@host:port
• NodeId - the byte representation of node's public key (no crypto operations)
• NodePubkey - newtype around secp256k1::PublicKey to distinguish node public key from other keys. Requires secp256k1 feature.

Note: invoice is not here and isn't planned because it already exists in a separate crate.

Features

This crate is no_std and no-alloc however limitations apply:

• P2PAddress requires nightly Rust because of ip_in_core - activate this explicitly using the nightly feature.
• Without alloc (on nightly), P2PAddress can not parse/store hostnames. Attempts to do so will return errors.

Integrations

The crate aims to be interoperable with other crates via optional dependencies. Currently available integrations (activate using features of the same name):

• bitcoin - converting between types
• serde - serialization and deserialization of types
• postgres-types - storing and retrieving from SQL
• parse_arg - parsing arguments into types in this crate
• secp256k1 - provides NodePubkey
• slog - provides slog::Value and (where relevant) slog::KV implementations for the types

Feel free to contribute your own!

Disclaimer: Inclusion of any crate here is neither endorsment nor guarantee of it being secure, honest, non-backdoored or functioning! You're required to do your own review of any external crate.

The rules around adding a new integration are lax: the dependency must be optional, must not be obviously broken or surprising, and must not interact with other implementations in surprising ways.

MSRV

The minimum supported Rust version is 1.48 but it's possible that it'll be decreased further. Generally, the intention is to support at least the latest Debian stable. However, P2PAddress is not available on no_std without nightly and once ip_in_core is stabilized, it will require the version it was stabilized in.

Note that external libraries may have higher MSRV - this is not considered a breakage.

License

MITNFA