Introducing the Alby Developer Portal
Hey builder community!
We're here to talk about something fresh we've shipped.
Since the introdution of the Alby Wallet API, the Alby team has continually invested in the API and developer experience to make building with bitcoin feel effortless. By focusing on clean documentation, libraries and SDKs with hands-on walkthroughs, our set of tools has been used by many projects out there such as the winners of the AI4All hackathon. There are even rumors that it takes less than 1 hour for developers to integrate bitcoin payments into an applications with the tool set from Alby. Still, we’re always looking for ways to further improve the experience for our community of developers.
This is why we’re excited to announce the launch of a new Alby Developer Portal to make building on bitcoin even faster.
A portal that lets you find the components you need for your app
For some time, these tools were hidden among the list of code repositories on GitHub or required interaction with the Alby team to get access. We thought we could do better.
Building on bitcoin such as accepting payments from your own users or letting users send payments to each other can feel like climbing endless mountain ranges. Once you climb the first summit, you’ll already see the next higher one. As if understanding bitcoin was not enough of a rabbit hole.
So we set out to create a portal that helps you:
- Get an overview of available components
- Get started at your own pace
- Learn which components fit together and are needed for your app
What’s new
UI to create OAuth Clients
You can connect Alby users to your app and outsource all things bitcoin to Alby: No node management or payment processing. Users can login to your app with Alby. Using the Alby Wallet API you can request limited access to their account, such as sending and receiving payments, reading balance, or decoding lightning invoices. Create the necessary credentials in your developer account.
UI to create Access Tokens
An Access Token allows you to access your personal Alby account from your application with the Alby Wallet API and detailed access permissions. Just set the scope of your application, add an expiry date and create a token.
UI to create Webhooks
Webhooks allow you to listen to incoming or outgoing payments from your Alby Account, receive instant notifications of payments and process them in your apps. How to process webhook is described in the API documentation.
Updated Developer Packages
Updated Alby JS SDK
Do you want to integrate the Alby Wallet API or Nostr Wallet Connect into your app? The Alby JS SDK has you covered. You can create webhooks for your app's users easily using the SDK and use it in pure HTML and JavaScript environments. You will also find the latest Nostr Wallet Connect spec in there as another standardised connection method for apps and wallets. New features are continuously being added such as getBalance, makeInvoice or lookupInvoice.
Updated Lightning Tools
Lightning Tools are a collection of highly useful and neutral tools for working with Lightning addresses, Boostagrams, Nostr Zaps, L402 for monetizing APIs, and more. They abstract away big parts of the complexity when handling bitcoin payments. Depending on your use case it might even be enough to just use a lightning address as your bitcoin backend to handle payments from your users or customers. The fact that you can use Lightning Tools in pure HTML and JavaScript environments such as Codepen makes your start even easier.
Web developers watch out!
The Alby Browser Extension exposes a set of APIs such as WebLN that makes the interaction with the bitcoin lightning wallets from your users incredibly easy. But that’s not all, the extension exposes more APIs such as window.nostr, window.alby and more to come - all conveniently documented in one guide. Sending or receiving payments becomes just one of many uses cases.
Although it's still early days, we wouldn't have gotten this far without all of you already using these tools and providing insights. If you have ideas to improve these libraries, APIs or the documentation around, let us know. We build for builders and are thankful for any feedback.