ldk-swift

Automatic Swift bindings generation for rust-lightning.

Installation

Swift Package Manager

To install using Swift Package Manager, add the following line to the depedencies array of your Package.swift:

.package(url: "https://github.com/lightningdevkit/ldk-swift/", exact: "0.0.118")

Be sure to also include "LightningDevKit" into your packages target like so:

targets: [
    .target(
        name: "YourPackage",
        dependencies: [
            .product(name: "LightningDevKit", package: "ldk-swift")
        ]),
    ...
]

If you're importing directly into Xcode, just copy and paste https://github.com/lightningdevkit/ldk-swift/ into the system dialog when you click "Add Package..."

Manual Installation

In order to use the automatically generated bindings, simply drag *.xcframework file into an Xcode project.

The *.xcframework files are either available on the Releases page, or can be compiled from scratch.

Compilation

Prerequisites

• A machine running macOS
• Xcode
• Python3
• Rust
• NPM
• GNU sed (optional, but will cut your compile times significantly!)

For Rust specifically, there are a couple additional requirements that can be installed once the Rust toolchain is set up:

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup target add aarch64-apple-darwin aarch64-apple-ios x86_64-apple-ios
cargo install cbindgen

Cloning Dependencies

In order to generate these bindings from scratch, you will need to clone two dependency repositories:

rust-lightning, (a specific branch built for bindings compatibility):

git clone --branch 0.0.124-bindings https://github.com/lightningdevkit/rust-lightning /path/to/rust-lightning

ldk-c-bindings:

git clone --branch main https://github.com/lightningdevkit/ldk-c-bindings /path/to/ldk-c-bindings

Take note of where you clone these directories, it's best you save the absolute path somewhere handy for the rest of the remaining steps.

Generating Rust-to-C-bindings

Now, navigate to the ldk-c-bindings directory and run the genbindings.sh script:

pushd path/to/ldk-c-bindings
./genbindings.sh /path/to/rust-lightning true
popd

Generating C-to-Swift-bindings

If using Docker

If you're using Docker to generate the Swift bindings, navigate (if you're not already there from the previous step) to the ldk-c-bindings directory and open the file located here:

/path/to/ldk-c-bindings/lightning-c-bindings/Cargo.toml

In that file, you will see four lines specifying the lightning, lightning-persister, lightning-invoice, and lightning-background-processor dependencies. They will most likely show local paths to the rust-lightning folder due to the previous genbindings.sh step. As Docker won't have access to local paths, replace those lines with the following:

lightning = { git = "https://github.com/thebluematt/rust-lightning", branch = "2023-07-0.0.116-java-bindings", default-features = false }
lightning-persister = { git = "https://github.com/thebluematt/rust-lightning", branch = "2023-07-0.0.116-java-bindings", default-features = false }
lightning-invoice = { git = "https://github.com/thebluematt/rust-lightning", branch = "2023-07-0.0.116-java-bindings", default-features = false }
lightning-background-processor = { git = "https://github.com/thebluematt/rust-lightning", branch = "2023-07-0.0.116-java-bindings", default-features = false }
lightning-rapid-gossip-sync = { git = "https://github.com/thebluematt/rust-lightning", branch = "2023-07-0.0.116-java-bindings", default-features = false }

You will note that the revision is unspecified and is currently just placeholder xxxs. To obtain the revision, just navigate to the just clone custom rust-lightning directory and run:

cd /path/to/rust-lightning
git rev-parse HEAD

Take that commit hash and replace the xxx instances with it.

Generating the Swift files

To generate the Swift files, navigate to the ldk-swift repository and run the following:

export LDK_SWIFT_GENERATOR_INPUT_HEADER_PATH="/path/to/ldk-c-bindings/lightning-c-bindings/include/lightning.h"
npm i && npm run tsc && node ./src/index.mjs

Now, the contents of ./ci/LDKSwift/Sources/LDKSwift/bindings will have been completely regenerated.

Updating Swift files in Xcode project

To make sure the correct bindings files are referenced in the project, open ./xcode/LDKFramework/LDK.xcodeproj.

In the sidebar, navigate to the LDK/bindings group, and delete it by removing references.

Then, open a Finder window, and drag the bindings folder (./ci/LDKSwift/Sources/LDKSwift/bindings) into the same location in Xcode that you just deleted.

Finally, make sure you leave the "Copy items if needed" box unchecked, and pick at least LightningDevKit as a target to add the references to. Depending on what you intend to do later on, it's easiest to simply add it to all the targets.

Building requisite binaries

Navigate (cd) to the ./scripts folder, and run the following Python script:

python3 ./build_bulk_libldks.py /path/to/ldk-c-bindings

This command will take a while, but it will eventually produce a set of binaries for all the platform/architecture combinations we're trying to support. Those binaries should adhere to the ./bindings/bin/release/<platform>/ folder pattern.

Each of those folders will contain an architectures directory with subdirectories such as arm64 or x86_64, as well as a libldk.a file, which is the lipo product of all the targeted architectures.

Generating the *.xcframework files

With all the binaries generated, still in the ./src/scripts directory, you just need to run one last Python script to produce the framework:

python3 ./generate_xcframework.py /path/to/ldk-c-bindings

Once the script finishes running, you should see LightningDevKit.xcframework in the ./bindings/bin/release folder. Drag that into your project, and you're done!