Run lightning-charge on c-lightning regtest

Question

I'm trying to run lighting-charge (https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning-charge) on top of one of my 2 lightning (https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning) instances. I am running 2 nodes using the script here: lightning/contrib/startup_regtest.sh. This file will start a bitcoin instance as well as 2 lightning nodes (/tmp/l1-regtest, /tmp/l2-regtest)

I then tried to run lightning-charge with:

$ NETWORK=regtest charged --api-token super_secret_1 --ln-path ~/.lightning --db-path ~/charge1.db --port 9112

Which gives me this error:

Lightning client connection error { Error: connect ECONNREFUSED ~/.lightning
    at Object._errnoException (util.js:1022:11)
    at _exceptionWithHostPort (util.js:1044:20)
    at PipeConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1198:14)
  code: 'ECONNREFUSED',
  errno: 'ECONNREFUSED',
  syscall: 'connect',
  address: '~/.lightning' }
events.js:183
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: connect ECONNREFUSED ~/.lightning
    at Object._errnoException (util.js:1022:11)
    at _exceptionWithHostPort (util.js:1044:20)
    at PipeConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1198:14)

I've also tried running it with ln-path set to /tmp/l1-regtest/

with ps aux I can see lightning is running with this command:

~/git/lightning/lightningd/lightningd --lightning-dir=/tmp/l1-regtest
and
~/git/lightning/lightningd/lightningd --lightning-dir=/tmp/l2-regtest

Does anyone know how to get lightning-charge to connect to my regtest lightning node?

There are instructions on how to do this in docker in the readme file (https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning-charge/blob/master/README.md), but it doesn't seem to work outside of docker.

Answer 1

the problem is in your call of charged there you are passing the argument --ln-path ~/.lightning assuming that you run lightning in your home directory thus you have to set ln-path to /tmp/l1-regtest/.

Now you say that this also did not work. So before I give you a solution let me explain what is actually going on. charged talkes to lightningd via an rpc-interface on an UNIX Domain socket. In older versions of lightningd there was a file called lightning-rpc in the folder that you specified as lightning-dir however lightningd has switched its API recently to to have subdirectories in lightning-dir for mainnet, testnet and regtest. (the reason was that in particular in the default directory people wanted to have different configs for mainnet, testnet and regtest)

Thus I assume that you will find lightning-rpc when you do ls /tmp/l1-regtest/regtest which means that you should pass the tmp/l1-regtest/regtest in --ln-path when you call charged. If that is not the case I would have to see another error message.