December 25, 2020
BitcartCC Version 0.1.0.0 released! Lightning network checkout, better currency formatting, improved checkout and more!
This update contains numerous changes, some of which are not backwards-compatible
Lightning has been supported in BitcartCC Core Daemons for a long time, but not in our payment methods.
Now BitcartCC fully supports Lightning Network as a checkout method too!
Lightning Network is supported via BitcartCC daemons's lightning mode.
It means that, there is still no need to install additional software, lightning is enabled just by one setting.
To enable lightning, just run:
export COIN_LIGHTNING=true
For each COIN (i.e. BTC, LTC) where you want to enable lightning support.
It will start a lighning gossip in the daemon, and enable the ability to perform lightning operations.
Lightning is currently only supported in native segwit wallets (electrum implementation limitation).
To enable lightning, visit wallets page, click on lightning icon, read all the warnings displayed.
Currently there are lots of limitations and issues in the Lightning Network itself, and the Electrum implementation, so proceed only if you understand that you may risk losing your funds, as Lightning Network is experimental.
But if you agree, press the green button, and lightning in the wallet will be enabled.
Lightning network is supported individually in each wallet, so even non-admin users can utilize it!
Each wallet can be considered an individual lightning node, or, better said, an account on the same lightning node.
So for each wallet you will have to open new lightning channels.
As lightning implementation is built-in in BitcartCC, it is not possible to use other implementations, and you will have to open channels from scratch.
Please read the warning in the admin panel for more details.
When enabled, and when creating an invoice, along with the regular currency checkout method, a lightning one will be created too.
On checkout, the customer will be able to scan/copy lightning invoice, and your node id, if they need to open a channel with you.
When paid, instantly you will see that invoice has been paid.
As every wallet is a fresh node, you will need a way to manage your lightning channels.
If you click on lightning icon near the wallet again, you will see a lightning management page.
It will display your lightning balance, node id and your lightning channels.
You are able to close or force-close channels from there.
Also you can open a new lightning channel or pay an lightning invoice from your lightning node in that same page.
When invoice has been paid, you will see the paid currency will have the lightning icon near it.
Also, all paid currencies are now upper-case, your existing data will be migrated.
To support lightning network, invoice data returned from API was changed.
payments key is now a list, and not a dictionary.
There are other changes to the API, please read the other release features below.
Also, new endpoints were added:
/wallets/{wallet_id}/checkln endpoint to check if lightning is supported for a wallet.
Returns False if not supported, node id otherwise
/wallets/{wallet_id}/channels endpoint, returning wallet's lightning channels
/wallets/{wallet_id}/channels/open endpoint, allowing to open a new lightning channel
/wallets/{wallet_id}/channels/close endpoint, allowing to close a lightning channel
/wallets/{wallet_id}/lnpay, allowing to pay a lightning invoice from your lightning node
To support lightning network, the daemon now has a new method: get_invoice, to get invoice by it's rhash.
To support lightning, as there are now even more checkout methods, will have listened to your suggestions, so now, currency selection is not tab-like, but it's a select list.
Changed the checkout modal layout, now it is more minimalistic and takes less space.
The exchange rate is now displayed in a pretty rate, and formatted correctly.
Added open in wallet button, which should launch user's application to automatically paste all the details to perform a payment.
Instead of displaying qr code and texts at once, and, considering that lightning invoices are big, we now have split the checkout into two tabs: Scan and Copy.
Scan tab will show a qr code
and Copy tab will display the texts, but as lightning invoices are long, it will display only parts of it, and by clicking on the fields, the full text will be copied
When on a lightning payment method, you will be able to switch between lightning invoice qr code and node id qr code.
The checkout page in the store was changed in a similar way.
To help newcomers, some special fields now have a question mark icon near them, by clicking on which, user will be redirected to our docs.
It should help to understand some basics without asking, right from your instance.
As requested, ID field was added to each datatable. It was possible to copy id before by clicking on copy icon, but now it's also displayed as a field
Do you remember weird amounts in the checkout before, like
1 BTC = 25000.424242 USD
When USD can have maximum of 2 decimal places?
It is finally fixed!
Now, every amount will be formatted as per it's currency settings.
Also, the rate string is now fancier than before, it can contain currency symbol and it's code.
There are some breaking changes to make it working
Now every amount in the payment methods is not a Decimal, but a string, which was already formatted for you.
Also, every payment method now has a rate field, which will contain a computer-readable formatted Decimal of the exchange rate at the moment of invoice creation.
Also every payment method now has a rate_str field, which is a human-readable pretty-formatted rate string, ready to be used in checkout
Now all background tasks are running only in the worker process, and not in every worker ran by gunicorn
Instead of using local process state, fetched and parsed data is now placed in redis, and fetched from there by workers serving requests.
Now, instead of each process logging concurrently, which lead to race condition (like, having logs from yesterday contain today's logs), each worker uses sends request to logging server, which is ran as part of the main background worker.
What does it mean?
It means that BitcartCC deployments should use way less RAM, should have less issues and work more stable.
Plus it means that logging system now works correctly
Logs in the admin panel are now sorted, and it is now possible to remove individual logs or clean them all.
Tor extension is now refreshed every 15 minutes instead of every 2 minutes to reduce logs spam.
Every setting supported by BitcartCC that is configured by an environment variable is supported.
Now, the conf directory of your cloned BitcartCC repo contains more samples:
/wallets/{wallet_id}/balance, which returns a dictionary with 4 keys:
confirmed, unconfirmed, lightning and unmatured.