Easy switch Tor - clearnet for bundle nodes
Nowadays we have a lot of "bundle" software nodes like: Umbrel, Citadel, myNode, Raspiblitz, Embassy etc. But all of them are focused in being "Tor only" nodes and offering quite a lot of apps for merchants.
The Problem
There is a problem in this matter: many small merchants want to use these bundle nodes, but is really unreliable to offer to your customers a "Tor only" payment request. Not everybody will use Tor just for paying a beer or buying groceries with sats. Tor is also very slow and unreliable for such things. We all want faster payments.
For just a private node, a Tor only node could be OK, but for a merchant that is offering public faced services and products is not a good way to operate only on Tor.
So, right now, these bundle nodes are not offering any "out-of-the-box" solution to the user to choose Tor or clearnet, for specific apps or entirely for the whole node. The node operator have to do a bunch of modifications in the node configuration, and sometimes are quite technical. Many of these operators are just simple merchants that want to offer LN payments, they do not have enough knowledge to do it themselves. For some is very frustrating and some of them even renounce to use LN for this.
Yes, there are ways to do it manually, I myself I wrote some guides about those steps, but I encounter many users that are afraid to do it or simply don't want. They want simple solutions, available in web UI of their nodes.
The Proposal Solution
Ideally will be a simple UI switch, in the web interface of the node bundle, where user can choose clearnet access to specific apps included and/or installed on the node and configure a simple form for domain and other settings needed.
Another simple button to restart the service or entire node, just to be sure the new settings are applied.
A better approach is to have this only for specific apps, because each one is using a specific port and certificate that have to be set. Also not all other node services are necessary to be out in clearnet.
Examples of these are LNbits and BTCPay Server, most used by merchants with small self-hosted nodes.
I hope somebody will come up with a nice and simple solution for these bundle nodes.