Thunderhub Guide
Thunderhub is an open source Graphical User Interface(GUI) for LND lightning network node management. Thunderhub can be thought of as the command center of your node. Here you can send and receive funds, open and close channels, set fee rates, and much more. This guide will go through how to launch your Thunderhub instance from your node dashboard and how interact with Thunderhub in the most common situations you will experience.
From your node dashboard, click the Thunderhub icon under applications.
Confirm by clicking Create Thunderhub on the next screen. You will then see Thunderhub is in the Provisioning state. This state will last aproximately 2 minutes.
When Provisioning is complete, and shows to be in the "Running" state, mouse over the icon and click Launch. This will bring you to a new tab in your browser where you can Login. The password is the same as your LND node unlock password. Once you enter your password you are now in your Thunderhub dashboard.
On your Thunderhub node dashboard you will immediately see your balances, and the options to send and receive both on chain and lightning. The On-chain wallet send/receive has the Anchor symbol, and the Lightning send/receive shows the Lightning Symbol.
To open a lightning channel from thunderhub, you must first add funds to the on chain balance of your lightning node. You can do this by clicking Receive with the anchor symbol. To open a channel, you can click the Open button under Quick Actions on the same dashboard. From there you can enter the node URI of the node you want to open a channel to, set fee rates, etc. If you need more information about the Lightning Network in general at this point, check out our Understanding Liquidity Video or this article.
To see your active channels, click channels on the left side menu on Thunderhub.
On this page you can see your liquidity as the blue/green bar on the left. Blue is your outbound liquidity (what you own of the channel and what you can spend) and Green is your inbound liquidity (what your peer owns, what you can receive). You can change fees of a channel by clicking the Square/Pencil icon under Actions, or close a channel by clicking the X. A few important notes:
- Never Force Close unless absolutely needed. Always cooperatively close a channel if given the option. This is to reduce your fees and avoid the 2+ week time lock on force closed channels.
- Keep in mind that there is a 1% channel reserve requirement. More information on the reserve can be found here.
On the left side menu there is a Transactions option. This is where you can see all pending and complete lightning payments to and from your node. If you click Chain, you will get a list of your on chain activity and UTXOs.
The forwards option on the left side menu allows you to sort and see the activity your node has as far as forwarding payments for other son the lightning network. You can see how many fees you have earned, how many sats you have routed, and more.
You can click Amboss to connect Thunderhub to Amboss.space. This is optional but if you want to use Magma/Hydro, you will have to link up your Thunderhub to Amboss.
The tools option on the left side menu in Thunderhub gives you access to some miscellaneous things you can do with your node. You can run accounting reports, back up your channels, sign and verify messages, or create custom permissions tokens for external access to your node (called macaroons).
Thunderhub is a robust interface for your LND node, and may take some time to understand all the functionality. As always if you have any questions, please let us know on discord at voltage.cloud/discord, or contact us through our direct support email at voltage.cloud/support.
