Plugin Development

Customise your Core Lightning node by leveraging its powerful modular architecture via plugins.

Plugins are a simple yet powerful way to extend the functionality provided by Core Lightning. They are subprocesses that are started by the main lightningd daemon and can interact with lightningd in a variety of ways:

• Command line option passthrough allows plugins to register their own command line options that are exposed through lightningd so that only the main process needs to be configured. Option values are not remembered when a plugin is stopped or killed, but can be passed as parameters to [plugin start][lightning-plugin].
• JSON-RPC command passthrough adds a way for plugins to add their own commands to the JSON-RPC interface.
• Event stream subscriptions provide plugins with a push-based notification mechanism about events from the lightningd.
• Hooks are a primitive that allows plugins to be notified about internal events in lightningd and alter its behavior or inject custom behaviors.