Core Lightning will not start after update: Cannot migrate account

Services Support
1

StartOS 0.3.5~1 on mini PC 16GB RAM 2TB SSD

In May 2024 I installed Knots (by sideloading it). Also installed Core Lightning from Community Registry. Knots expired a couple of days ago, so had to uninstall it (because no option to change expiry in GUI) and then I installed Knots 29.2 from Community Registry. After 18 hour IBD Knots is now running OK. I then updated Core Lightning, but it will not start.

Log shows:

2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 Starting Wait for Bitcoin Start
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 Cleaning old lightning rpc
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 Starting lightningd
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 Waiting for lightning rpc to start…
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 2026-01-11T20:30:18.287Z INFO lightningd: v25.09.3-modded
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 2026-01-11T20:30:18.366Z UNUSUAL plugin-bookkeeper: topic ‘utxo_deposit’ is not a known notification topic
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 2026-01-11T20:30:18.366Z UNUSUAL plugin-bookkeeper: topic ‘utxo_spend’ is not a known notification topic
2026-01-11T21:30:18+01:00 2026-01-11T20:30:18.398Z INFO lightningd: Updating database from version 256 to 277
2026-01-11T21:30:19+01:00 Cannot migrate account database version 15
2026-01-11T21:30:48+01:00 lightningd has stopped, exiting container

2

I wrote “Community Registry” but I guess the correct is “Start9 Registry”.

3

Knots doesn’t cause other services to fail to install/upgrade.

I’d be interesting to know more about CLN. You provide some unrelated Knots details, then say CLN doesn’t work, when it is CLN we need more details about.

What version of CLN were you running, what did you update to?
It looks like you were upgrading a very old version to a very recent version and the migration failed.

4

I installed CLN “v24.05-modded” in mid-May 2024 and never had tried to update it before yesterday. The version now is 25.09.3.

5

What do you have in this instance of CLN? Funds? Channels?

6

Yes. 13 active channels. Around 4M sats total in the channels.

7

Also 6 pending channels I had tried to open months ago, so 19 total channels shown in GUI.

8

I am getting help in the Telegram “Core Lightning (CLN)” group:

“With the review done on our system, it occurred that the failure is due to a bookkeeper (accounts) database migration error in Core Lightning as a result of bug inflation when upgrading from v24.05 to v25.09.3.”

CLN devs will provide a rectifying server and a guide for me to use on my CLN node. Waiting for that.

9

Damn Telegram scammers. Ended up where they wanted me to enter seed phrases or private key.

10

Someone here who can help? Or maybe I must try Blockstream official CLN support.

11

Got help in Discord group “core-lightning”, they sent me here:

Solution for me was renaming the file accounts.sqlite3 like so:
sudo podman exec -it c-lightning.embassy bash
mv /root/.lightning/bitcoin/accounts.sqlite3 /root/.lightning/bitcoin/xxaccounts.sqlite3.bak

12

Indeed…

  1. Stop the CLN service
  2. SSH into the server (Start9 | Using SSH)
  3. sudo mv /embassy-data/package-data/volumes/c-lightning/data/main/bitcoin/accounts.sqlite3 /embassy-data/package-data/volumes/c-lightning/data/main/bitcoin/old-accounts.sqlite3
  4. Start CLN again
13

This is a better solution than what I used (I didn’t know how to get to the accounts file outside the container, which was stopping and restarting every 20 seconds or so).

14

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