README.md

BTCPay Server

Accept Bitcoin payments ₿

BTCPay Server is a free and open-source Bitcoin payment processor which allows you to accept bitcoin without fees or intermediaries.

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💼 Table of Contents

• Features
• Getting Started
• Documentation
• Contributing
• Developing
  • API
• Community
• License
• Supporters

🎨 Features

• Direct, peer-to-peer Bitcoin payments
• No transaction fees (other than the network fee)
• No fees, middleman or KYC
• Non-custodial (complete control over the private key)
• Enhanced privacy & security
• Self-hosted
• SegWit support
• Lightning Network support (LND, Core Lightning (CLN), Eclair)
• Tor support
• Share your instance with friends (multi-tenant)
• Invoice management and Payment requests
• Apps: Point of sale, crowdfunding, donation button
• Full-node reliant wallet with hardware wallet integration and SegWit support
• Bitcoin-only build, separate community-maintained altcoin build (supported altcoins)

🚀 Getting Started

Firstly, decide if you want to host an instance yourself or use a third-party host. If you've chosen to self-host, there are plenty of documented ways to deploy BTCPay Server.

After successful deployment, make sure to check our getting started and walkthrough guides. In case you would like to use Lightning Network, see Lightning guide.

📗 Documentation

Please check out our official website, complete documentation and FAQ for more details.

If you have trouble using BTCPay Server, consider joining communities listed on the official website to get help from other contributors. Only create a GitHub issue for technical issues you can't resolve through other channels or feature requests you've validated with other members of the community.

🤝 Contributing

BTCPay Server is built and maintained entirely by volunteer contributors around the internet. We welcome and appreciate new contributions.

If you're a developer looking to help, but you're not sure where to begin, check the good first issue label, which contains small pieces of work that have been specifically flagged as being friendly to new contributors.

Contributors looking to do something a bit more challenging, before opening a pull request, please join our community chat or start a GitHub discussion to get early feedback, discuss the best ways to tackle the problem, and ensure there is no work duplication.

There are many other ways to get involved with the project. Check our contribution guidelines. To get the big-picture of the project development, visit our evolving roadmap.

🧑‍💻 Developing

To begin developing locally, visit our local development guide. There are also several video-tutorials:

• Setting up development environment on Windows
• Setting up development environment Linux (Ubuntu)
• Setting up development environment MacOS

How to build

While the documentation advises using docker-compose, you may want to build BTCPay Server yourself.

First, install .NET SDK v8.0 as specified by the Microsoft website.

On Powershell:

.\build.ps1

On linux:

./build.sh

How to run

Use the run scripts to run BTCPay Server, this example shows how to print the available command-line arguments of BTCPay Server.

On Powershell:

.\run.ps1 --help

On linux:

./run.sh --help

How to debug

If you want to debug, use Jetbrain's Rider or Visual Studio 2022.

You need to run the development time docker-compose as described in the test guide.

You can then run the debugger by using the Launch Profile Docker-Regtest.

If you need to debug ledger wallet interaction, install the development time certificate with:

# Install development time certificate in the trust store
dotnet dev-certs https --trust

Then use the Docker-Regtest-https debug profile.

Other dependencies

For more information, see the documentation: How to deploy a BTCPay Server instance.

🧪 API

BTCPay Server has two APIs:

• Greenfield API (New)
  • Greenfield API documentation
  • Greenfield API examples with CURL
• Legacy API

The Greenfield API is our brand-new API which is still in development. Once complete, it will allow you to run BTCPay Server headlessly. The Legacy API, is fully compatible with BitPay's API. It has limited features, but allows instant migration from BitPay.

💚 Community

Our community is the ❤️ of the project. To chat with other community members in real-time, join our Mattermost chat. We're also on GitHub discussions.

📝 License

BTCPay Server software, logo and designs are provided under MIT License.

🙏 Supporters

The BTCPay Server Project is proudly supported by these entities through the BTCPay Server Foundation.

If you'd like to support the project, please visit the donation page.