Building on Lightning

Welcome to the Building on Lightning tutorial!

This tutorial will help you become familiar with creating applications that interact with the Lightning Network.

This tutorial is for individuals with some familiarity of the Lightning Network and that have moderate software development experience. The applications are written with TypeScript and Node.js. These tools were used because API and backend systems for websites and mobile applications frequently use Node.js. The static typing of TypeScript help with code clarity and provide real time feedback while coding.

This tutorial will walk you through two applications.

The first application will get you comfortable building an application that connects to a Lightning Network node. It will render a visualization of the node's network graph. While the focus of these tutorials isn't UI development, this application will have some UI components to show you how information can be threaded through an application.

The second application will focus on invoices. It will construct a simple game of ownership using paid invoices. With this application you will become familiar with code to create, retrieve, and monitor invoices.

The last section of this tutorial will cover advanced Lightning Network topics. These scripts will highlight some of the experimental and lower level tooling you may need when building more complicated Lightning Network applications.

Happy Coding!