LIGHTNING-INVOICE(7)

NAME
lightning-invoice - Command for accepting payments.

SYNOPSIS

invoice msatoshi label description [expiry] [fallbacks] [preimage] [exposeprivatechannels]

DESCRIPTION

The invoice RPC command creates the expectation of a payment of a given amount of milli-satoshi: it returns a unique token which another lightning daemon can use to pay this invoice. This token includes a route hint description of an incoming channel with capacity to pay the invoice, if any exists.

The msatoshi parameter can be the string "any", which creates an invoice that can be paid with any amount. Otherwise it is in millisatoshi precision; it can be a whole number, or a whole number ending in msat or sat, or a number with three decimal places ending in sat, or a number with 1 to 11 decimal places ending in btc.

The label must be a unique string or number (which is treated as a string, so "01" is different from "1"); it is never revealed to other nodes on the lightning network, but it can be used to query the status of this invoice.

The description is a short description of purpose of payment, e.g. 1 cup of coffee. This value is encoded into the BOLT11 invoice and is viewable by any node you send this invoice to. It must be UTF-8, and cannot use \u JSON escape codes.

The expiry is optionally the time the invoice is valid for; without a suffix it is interpreted as seconds, otherwise suffixes s, m, h, d, w indicate seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks respectively. If no value is provided the default of 604800 (1w) is used.

The fallbacks array is one or more fallback addresses to include in the invoice (in order from most-preferred to least): note that these arrays are not currently tracked to fulfill the invoice.

The preimage is a 64-digit hex string to be used as payment preimage for the created invoice. By default, if unspecified, lightningd will generate a secure pseudorandom preimage seeded from an appropriate entropy source on your system. IMPORTANT: if you specify the preimage, you are responsible, to ensure appropriate care for generating using a secure pseudorandom generator seeded with sufficient entropy, and keeping the preimage secret. This parameter is an advanced feature intended for use with cutting-edge cryptographic protocols and should not be used unless explicitly needed.

If specified, exposeprivatechannels overrides the default route hint logic, which will use unpublished channels only if there are no published channels. If true unpublished channels are always considered as a route hint candidate; if false, never.

The route hint is selected from the set of incoming channels of which: peer’s balance minus their reserves is at least msatoshi, state is normal, the peer is connected and not a dead end (i.e. has at least one other public channel). The selection uses some randomness to prevent probing, but favors channels that become more balanced after the payment.

RETURN VALUE

On success, a hash is returned as payment_hash to be given to the payer, and the expiry_time as a UNIX timestamp. It also returns a BOLT11 invoice as bolt11 to be given to the payer.

On failure, an error is returned and no invoice is created. If the lightning process fails before responding, the caller should use lightning-listinvoice(7) to query whether this invoice was created or not.

The following error codes may occur:

    • -1. Catchall nonspecific error.

    • 900. An invoice with the given label already exists.

    • 901. An invoice with the given preimage already exists.

One of the following warnings may occur (on success):

    • warning_offline if no channel with a currently connected peer has the incoming capacity to pay this invoice

    • warning_capacity if there is no channel that has both sufficient incoming capacity and a peer that is publicly connected (i.e. not a dead end)

AUTHOR

Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> is mainly responsible.

SEE ALSO

lightning-listinvoice(7), lightning-delinvoice(7), lightning-getroute(7), lightning-sendpay(7).

RESOURCES

Main web site: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning