By Lisa Neigut

The c-lightning team is pleased to announce the v0.9.2 release of c-lightning. This release builds on the infrastructure work in our last release, by 15 contributors from all over the world (including four first-time contributors) and comprising 328 commits.

Some of the most significant changes coming with this release:

• Notifications
• Channel state updates
• Plugin hook ordering

We’ve provided details of these updates below.

Real-time Notifications

Long-running commands such as close and pay are difficult to gauge how much work or progress is being made. In this release, we’ve added notifications to our RPC framework. You can see these in action with v0.9.2 on close. Note you’ll need to have allow-deprecated-apis set to false for these to work.

As a plugin developer, you can now have commands return notifications as well, as pyln-client has been updated to accommodate them.

Channel State Updates

Furthering the transparency of node updates, v0.9.2 will now provide detailed information about channel closures and full tracking of each channel's state transitions. If a channel closes, you’ll be able to see the state updates via listpeers. This is useful if a channel closed unexpectedly, as it’ll tell you what initiated the close. We hope this makes the channel lifetime a bit more transparent for all users.

Plugin Hook Ordering

If you’re a plugin developer, this update is for you. Many c-lightning plugins implement chainable hooks, but the ordering has never been static or configurable. With v0.9.2, we now add the ability to specify dependencies between other plugins at the hook level. This gives you the ability to specify behavior that must happen before or after your plugin hook.

Specifying dependencies at the hook level also gives developers more fine-grained control and predictability when writing chainable hooks. It also enables more complex interactions between different plugins.

CLBOSS: Put Your Node to Work

Long-time c-lightning core contributor, ZmnSCPxj, recently announced the CLBOSS plugin, a total automated C-lightning plugin for managing on-chain funds. While the plugin is still in beta, if you’ve been looking for a one-stop solution for low-effort channel management, then CLBOSS may be the right solution for you.

Here are just a few of CLBOSS’s features:

• Find candidates to make channels with (“autopilot”).
• Get incoming capacity by using offchain-to-onchain swaps.
• Monitor onchain funds and strive to get them into channels during low-fee periods, using multifundchannel.
• Gather statistics on how good your peers are at forwarding.
• Rebalance channels if they are too imbalanced, including “JIT Routing,” aka rebalancing on forward.

Roadmap and Development Meetings

As a reminder, the c-lightning team holds biweekly video chat meetings for developers. These run at the same Monday 8 PM UTC as the Lightning Specification meetings, but on alternate weeks. You can find additional details in the #c-lightning IRC dev chat channel on Freenode. Come ask some questions or just hang out with us as we discuss our current projects!

You can see what current c-lightning development is planned or in progress on the project wiki.

We’re excited about all the development activity on Lightning — join us!

Note: This blog was originally posted at https://medium.com/blockstream/new-release-c-lightning-0-9-2-8cf6c20d47be