Create a Lightning Alias

How to create a Lightning Alias

Your own Lightning Node has a unique Node ID consisting of over 50 letters and numbers which looks like this:

0318ac9faa9629e7da08819bc8fe0dd2ae3044d69b1b2283a63479acffeb968483

Coincharge was chosen as the Lightning Alias so that other nodes in the channel overview can better see with which nodes a connection exists.

This Lightning Alias can be freely defined and is stored on the Lightning Node.

How to assign a Lightning Alias to your own Lightning Node is explained in this article.

We explain how a Lightning alias is changed at Lunanode and at a Docker installation. Then follows the instructions for setting up the Lightning Alias for the hardware nodes of Nodl and Raspiblitz.

Create Lightning Alias at Lunanode

To give your Lightning Node a Lightning Alias, you need to log on to your server via SSH.

To do this, you need to log on to the server where the Lightning Node is running using the Terminal (Mac) or PuTTY (Windows) applications.

If you have your BTCPay server running with the Lightning Node at Lunanode, you will find the access data in the Lunanode backend.

Access to the server consists of the username before the @ sign followed by the name of the server such as btcpayXXXXX.lndyn.com

Create Lightning Alias at Docker / Virtual Machine (VM)

Then open the Terminal or PuTTY window on your computer and enter the command ssh followed by the username, the @ sign and then the name of your server.

That should look something like this:

ssh ubuntu@btcpay123456.lndyn.com

Then you click on Enter and are asked to enter the password for the server.

Then the following commands are entered and confirmed with Enter at the end:

sudo su

cd /root/btcpayserver-docker

Now you have to choose a name for your Lightning Node. This name is inserted between the brackets instead of insertnamehere:

LIGHTNING_ALIAS=(insertnamehere)

The BTCPay must then be restarted and this is done with the command:

. btcpay-setup.sh -i

Set up Lightning Alias on the Nodl

If you own a hardware node from the provider Nodl, you can change the Lightning alias name via the Nodl backend.

At the bottom of the page there is the field Alias (public name for your node)

Here you can enter the name and save it.

Raspiblitz

There you enter the desired name and confirm the entry with OK.

Changing the Lightning alias may take some time to spread it around the Lightning network.

To check the distribution, you can search for your own Lightning Node at 1ml.com and check if the Lightning alias is already displayed.