Core Lightning · commando · JSON lines
Your Lightning node as a stream of events. Payments, forwards, deposits and channel changes, printed the moment the node records them, from anywhere it's reachable on the Lightning port.
cargo install --git https://github.com/jb55/lnsocket-monitor$ lnsocket-monitor -n mynode | jq -c
Illustrative output, trimmed. Real lines carry more fields.
events
Every line has type, node and time, with amounts in msat. Pipe it into jq, a bot, a log, or the notifier below. --replay N prints the last N of each kind at startup, so you can see output before anything happens.
Someone paid you. The description holds the zap request when it's a zap.
A payment you made completed: amount, fee, destination alias, parts.
You routed a payment. In and out peers by alias, and the fee you earned.
Coins confirmed in your on-chain wallet, with the txid.
A channel's funding locked in: peer, capacity, your side, who opened it.
A channel's funding was spent: peer, capacity, what came back to you.
A channel peer came online. Gossip-only peers are left out.
A channel peer went away, with the reason when the node has one.
how it works
Core Lightning's wait RPC blocks until a subsystem's index moves. The monitor keeps one waiting per subsystem, then reads exactly what changed from the last index it saw.
wait calls, one per connection. The solid one carries everything else.A commando connection answers nothing else while a command runs on it, so each blocking wait gets a socket of its own. The list* calls never queue behind one.
When a wait returns, the monitor lists from the last index it reported, not the one returned. A dropped connection never skips an event.
Opens and closes come from chain moves, recorded when the funding locks in and when it's spent, so there's no channel list to diff.
Every wait connection pings the node each minute and reconnects when it stops hearing back. Everything it sends is read-only and safe to resend.
contrib/nudge
contrib/nudge/lnsocket-nudge runs the monitor and posts each event with nudge. It's one Python file with no dependencies.
⚡ 5,000 sats from ada · great thread 🧡
on: running a node at home, one year in
Channel closed with Wobbly Ferret
2,000,000 sats channel, 1,412,880 sats ours
⚡ Received 21 sats
coffee
Mock-ups. Names, amounts and notes are made up.
A zap invoice carries the zap request. The zapper's profile and the zapped note are looked up on a local nostr relay (notedeck's, ws://127.0.0.1:6677), so the notification shows who it was, their picture and what they zapped.
Clicking a zap runs nd call open nostr:note1… through nudge's actions.json, opening the note in notedeck, or the profile for a profile zap. Chain events open the transaction on mempool.space.
Everything else wears a bolt icon with the node's alias as the sender, so it never looks like a generic script notification.
The monitor is restarted if it exits. --skip forward_settled drops kinds you don't want, and --dry-run prints instead of posting.
setup
The monitor reads the same config as lnrpc, so a node you already call by name works as is.
Lists, gets and wait, and nothing that spends.
$ lightning-cli createrune restrictions='[["method^list","method^get","method=wait"],["method/listdatastore"]]'
Kept in ~/.config/lnrpc/config.toml, mode 0600. The first node is the default.
$ lnrpc config add mynode 02a1…c3f9 ln.example.com <rune>
Replay a few old events to see the shape of the output.
$ cargo install --git https://github.com/jb55/lnsocket-monitor $ lnsocket-monitor --replay 3
Install nudge, then run the notifier from a checkout.
$ brew install --cask jb55/nudge/nudge && nudge --authorize $ git clone https://github.com/jb55/lnsocket-monitor $ lnsocket-monitor/contrib/nudge/lnsocket-nudge