Channel Tools

Channel Tools, or chantools, is a recovery kit for Lightning funds. It is what you reach for when LND itself will no longer start and the normal ways of closing channels and sweeping balances are unavailable, working directly against LND's files, seed, and channel state rather than through a running daemon.

The situations it exists for are the bad ones: a corrupted channel database, a node that must be rebuilt from seed while channels are still open, or funds stranded in a channel whose peer has disappeared. Commands can derive keys from your seed, extract channel details, produce sweep transactions, and rescue on-chain outputs a broken node cannot claim on its own.

Two cautions from the developers deserve repeating: the tool was built for particular rescue operations and may not cover your exact circumstances, and several commands query public block explorer APIs by default, disclosing the addresses you ask about unless you supply a private endpoint. On a MyNode it runs from a terminal over SSH alongside LND — worth having installed before the day you need it.