Rust BCLI

A CoreLightning bitcoin backend plugin written in rust to replace the built-in bcli.

This plugin implements all five required bitcoin backend methods:

• getchaininfo
• estimatefees
• getrawblockbyheight
• getutxout
• sendrawtransaction

However, unlike bcli they can be compiled out optionally so only a subset will be implemented. This allows other plugins which only need to implement one of the five required methods to be used in conjunction with this plugin.

For instance, using plugin to perform a different sendrawtransaction implementation to send over tor. Or substitute estimatefees to use mempool.space for fee estimation.

Installation

The following commands build the plugin binary:

git clone https://github.com/andrewtoth/rust-bcli
cd rust-bcli
cargo install --path .

The binary will now be at $HOME/.cargo/bin/rust-bcli. You can now place this binary into the plugins folder, add it to the conf file with plugin=$HOME/.cargo/bin/rust-bcli (replace $HOME with your home directory), or add it as a command line option via lightningd --plugin=$HOME/.cargo/bin/rust-bcli --disable-plugin=bcli. You must also disable bcli with the --disable-plugin=bcli command line option or put disable-plugin=bcli in the conf file.

To remove a specific backend method, install with features specifying which methods to disable. For example, the following command will remove estimatefees from the binary installing:

cargo install --path . --features noestimatefees

In order to use this binary now, another plugin that only implements estimatefees must be used.