Documentation overview

This is a community summary. The complete, current documentation lives with the project — see the Eclair README and the project wiki.

Configuration

Eclair reads its settings from a HOCON file, usually ~/.eclair/eclair.conf. HOCON is a human-friendly configuration format (a superset of JSON) that supports comments and nested keys. Configuration covers which chain you run, how to reach Bitcoin Core, networking and Tor, fee policy, channel limits, and API access.

# illustrative snippet — verify keys against the official docs
eclair.chain = "mainnet"
eclair.server.port = 9735
eclair.api.enabled = true
eclair.bitcoind.rpcuser = "user"
eclair.bitcoind.rpcpassword = "password"

The API and eclair-cli

Eclair exposes a JSON-RPC style HTTP API. The bundled eclair-cli script is a thin wrapper that makes it convenient from the shell. Because everything runs through the API, Eclair is easy to automate from other languages and services.

$ eclair-cli getinfo          # node id, block height, version
$ eclair-cli channels         # list channels
$ eclair-cli createinvoice --amountMsat=<amt> --description="test"
$ eclair-cli payinvoice --invoice=<bolt11>