How to get the default macaroons on LND , on a Start9?

DIY, Hacking, & How-To
1

QUESTION!

I need the invoice.macaroon on my Start9 LND hub. Can anyone tell me how I can get the contents of that file? I am able to SSH (over Tor) into my Start9. I can see the Start9 LND setting that lets me “reset the macaroons” but nothing in there lets me view them.

NOTE1: “On startup, lnd checks to see if the admin.macaroon , readonly.macaroon and invoice.macaroon files exist. If they don’t exist, lnd updates its database with a new macaroon ID, generates the three files admin.macaroon , readonly.macaroon and invoice.macaroon , all with the same ID.”

NOTE2: I know how to do it with ThunderHub, but Start9 doesnt’ have Thunderhub (Tools–>Macaroon->Bake)

2

Sorta looks like I need to take this route: Start9 | Service Containers

3

First, elevate yourself to root:
sudo -i

Then you can exec into the lnd container with:
docker exec -it lnd.embassy bash

Then navigate to the folder it’s in, /root/.lnd and echo their contents:

cd /root/.lnd/
for macaroon in *.macaroon ; do
 echo $macaroon:
 cat $macaroon
done
4

Thanks. When I get in there, the macaroons are not raw text printable.

Also, my lncli doesn’t seem to want to connect to itself within the container:

bash-5.1# lncli listmacaroonids
[lncli] rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = connection error: desc = 
"transport: Error while dialing dial tcp 127.0.0.1:10009: 
connect: connection refused"

I tried these, which are not working for me:

lncli listmacaroonids
lncli --macaroonpath=/root/.lnd/public/invoice.macaroon getinfo
lncli getinfo

None of those work due to connectivity issue?

Is there a trick to getting lncli connect to work? It seems like I am being denied from connecting from within the container.

I tried this, same connect error:

lncli connect <pubkey>@lnd.embassy:9735

netstat -l reports that it allows connections from all hosts to 9735… on that connect call to port 9735 WHY is it giving me an error it cant connect to 10009??

5

RESOLUTION:

Final resolution was into install Thunderhub via Community Marketplace and then Bake the Macaroom from the UI.

Couldn’t figure out why lncli wouldn’t work.

2 Likes
6

Glad to hear it.

It seems if you need the macaroon you have to transform it like this:
From inside the lnd.embassy container:
xxd -ps -u -c 1000 /root/.lnd/public/admin.macaroon

From embassyOS (as root):
xxd -ps -u -c 1000 /embassy-data/package-data/volumes/lnd/data/main/public/admin.macaroon

7

New to Start9, my node is a migration from Umbrel and it appears that things are “working” Thuderhub, lndg all seem to work, no obvious errors I’ve found.

Had a channel peer ask why I closed a channel ( I don’t remember closing a channel , nor can I find a record that says I did.)

Tried to hunt things down in lncli but that’s throwing the RPC error above.

But when trying to connect to lncli I get the RPC error mentioned above.

For the sake of understand lets assume I have only the vaguest idea of what a macaroon is and how they are used. Seems like a sort of Permissions list assigned to a key…

Anyways, Not really sure how to troubleshoot, or what logging I can get to work through this issue. lncli connection refused.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

8

I’m not sure your particular issue has anything to do with macaroons at all, you probably should have starting your own topic, but an example of a lncli command is…

sudo podman exec -ti lnd.embassy lncli --rpcserver=lnd.embassy wtclient stats

or to get into the contain and then execute commands

sudo podman exec -ti lnd.embassy bash

lncli --rpcserver=lnd.embassy wtclient stats

Basically, make sure you add --rpcserver=lnd.embassy each time.

9

Ah ha! That’s exceedingly helpful and makes quite a bit of sense. I assume with start9 to ignore what I would conventionally use as the network stack. 127.0.0.1 etc and so on.

10

Well, everything is not exactly running on localhost on different ports, no.