GUIDE: Setting up dynamic fees with charge-lnd

[Wiredancer]

Charge-lnd is great tool which will allow you for automatic fee adjustment given the criteria you set up in the .conf file. It is great for proportional balancing of your channel depending on where the sats are. I highly recommend everyone to set it up as it will make your life much easier!

This setup has been tested on Raspi 4B 8GB ramm with myNode 0.2.41, but will likely work well independent on the version.

Lets get to it!

1. Login to your terminal.

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ssh admin@mynode.local or ssh admin@your.node.ip.address

(if you are using windows you can use putty to login to your node)

2. Switch to Bitcoin user for installation of charge-lnd.

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sudo su - bitcoin

3. Download charge-lnd.

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git clone https://github.com/accumulator/charge-lnd.git

4. Create macaroon (application key) authorizing charge-lnd to adjust your node.

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lncli bakemacaroon offchain:read offchain:write onchain:read info:read --save_to=~/.lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet/charge-lnd.macaroon

5. Move to the directory of charge-lnd.

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cd charge-lnd

6. Install setuptools to let you install other packages.

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pip install -U setuptools

7. Build and install charge-lnd on your node.

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pip install -r requirements.txt .

8. Test that charge-lnd is working.

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/home/bitcoin/.local/bin/charge-lnd -h

Output should show you options and arguments of charge-lnd. Should look like this:


If you see this your charge-lnd is installed correctly and we can continue.

9. Exit bitcoin user and create default config file.

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exit
sudo nano /home/bitcoin/charge-lnd/charge.config

10. Use the editor to create your fee policies. This is the file where you will return often to tweak your policies.
You could use something like this for start:

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[default]
strategy = static
base_fee_msat = 1_000
fee_ppm = 100
# 'default' is special, it is used if no other policy matches a channel

[proportional]
chan.min_ratio = 0.1
chan.max_ratio = 0.9
strategy = proportional
min_fee_ppm = 100
max_fee_ppm = 1000
# 'proportional' can also be used to auto balance (lower fee rate when low remote balance & higher rate when higher remote balance)
# fee_ppm decreases linearly with the channel balance ratio (min_fee_ppm when ratio is 1, max_fee_ppm when ratio is 0)

For complete list of charge-lnd policies please see this example and REadme

11. Once you have your policies ready you can try to run --dry-run (doesn't actually apply changes) and see how your fees would be changed.

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sudo -u bitcoin /home/bitcoin/.local/bin/charge-lnd -c /home/bitcoin/charge-lnd/charge.config --dry-run

12. After you run dry run and you are happy with the result you can run the command without --dry-run and changes will apply to your node.

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sudo -u bitcoin /home/bitcoin/.local/bin/charge-lnd -c /home/bitcoin/charge-lnd/charge.config 

13. Last thing we have to do is schedule the process to run every few hours to keep your fees updated. Log back to user bitcoin.

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sudo su bitcoin

14. Enter cron task list.

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crontab -e

15. Add the task to the end of the file for cron to run every two hours. You can change the interval by changing */2 to other intervals */1 for one hour etc..

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0 */2 * * * /home/bitcoin/.local/bin/charge-lnd -c /home/bitcoin/charge-lnd/charge.config

In order to not spam lightning network you should not change the fees more other than about once an hour. For more detailed setting of your cron interval please check crontab.guru
Save and done!

Congratulation! Your node is now adjusting fees automatically.
Please make sure you still check your fees for couple of days before you are sure all your settings are correct to avoid errors leading in bad fee settings.

If you find any mistakes or something not working correctly please let me know and I will do my best to correct.
Hope you will find this useful.
LNG

original article: https://nullcount.com/install-charge-ln ... autopilot/