Ride the Lightning

Ride the Lightning, usually shortened to RTL, is a complete web interface for operating a Lightning node. It is one of the longest-established Lightning management interfaces and, for many node operators, the main way they interact with their node day to day.

The dashboard covers the whole picture: on-chain and channel balances, channel states and capacity, peers, routing activity, and fee earnings. From there you can open and close channels, send and receive both Lightning and on-chain payments, generate and manage invoices, and adjust the fee policies your node advertises to the network.

Liquidity management is well covered. Circular rebalancing moves funds between your own channels to correct a lopsided one without touching the chain, and RTL integrates the Loop swap service for moving value between your channels and on-chain when rebalancing internally is not enough.

It is deliberately implementation-agnostic, supporting LND, Core Lightning, and Eclair, and it is device-agnostic in layout — the interface works properly on a phone or tablet, not just a desktop browser, which matters when you want to check on the node from the couch.

On a MyNode it connects to your LND automatically. If you are looking for one interface to run your node from and are not sure where to start, this is the conventional answer.