Overview

Mango is a web based lightning wallet

What is the lightning network?

The Lightning Network is a rapidly growing second layer payment protocol that works on top of Bitcoin to provide near-instantaneous transactions between two parties. It improves Bitcoin’s transaction speed, scalability and privacy.

Features

• Connect to an LND node
• Send a payment over lightning
• Receive a payment over lightning
• View channels
• Open channels
• Close channels

Set up and installation

Git

• git clone the repo
• cd into the root of the project directory

Polar

• Download Polar here - Polar is a tool for regtesting lightning networks
• Set up a local cluster - learn about how to do this here
  • The network must have a Bitcoin node, two LND lightning nodes, and a channel between them with liquidity on both sides

Database

• Set up a MongoDB database locally or using Atlas
• A modified version of the connection string will be used in /backend/.env
  • If you are running the database locally, the connection string will be mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017 by default
  • The default environment variable for the DB_URI is mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/mango

Environment

• Rename the /client/.env.example file to /client/.env and rename /backend/.env.example to /backend/.env
  • Update the environment variables appropriately - some environment variables will be obtained from Polar and MondoDB

Dependency installation and development servers

• To run the backend, cd backend from the root of the project directory
  • Run npm i to install the backend dependencies
  • Run npm run dev to run the backend in development
  • The server will start listening for requests (by default the server will be hosted on http://localhost:3001)
• To run the frontend, cd client from the root of the project directory
  • Run npm i to install the frontend dependencies
  • Run npm start to run the frontend in development
  • Navigate to the local client URL (by default this is http://localhost:3000) in the browser to see the project

Tech stack

Front end

• React
• TypeScript
• Tailwind
• Redux
• RTK Query

Back end

• Node.js
• TypeScript
• Express

Database

• MongoDB

Lightning

• Polar
• LND

Protocols

• REST
• gRPC