This is a detailed step-by-step guide (divided in three articles) to help you setup a bitcoin regtest network on MacOS and create a Lightning playground.

Here a index:

Part 1Part 1

• configure the Bitcoin environment
• create a Bitcoin wallet
• create an address, give it a label
• mine some blocks to that address
• configure two Lightening nodes

Part 2Part 2

• confirm that we have the correct bitcoin.conf settings
• spin up a Bitcoin network
• Ensure we are on the regtest network
• Prepare the first lightning node aka lnd1 for some action
• • Spin up node
• • Create wallet
• • Get some information about the node
• • Generate an Address
• • Fund the lnd1 wallet with some bitcoin
• • • load up our existing local Bitcoin wallet
• • • send some bitcoin to generated lnd1 wallet address (to be sent to lnd2 later on)
• • Check wallet balance
• Prepare the second lightning node aka lnd2 for some action

Part 3Part 3

• Connect the lightning nodes to form a peer
• Open a payment channel between lnd1 and lnd2 nodes
• Add some confirmations to the block that the channel opening transaction was mined on
• Check the list of channels to ensure our channel is ready and funded
• Create an invoice on lnd2
• inspect the invoice created above from lnd1
• Pay or satisfy the invoice created by lnd2 via lnd1
• Close the payment channels, kill both Bitcoin and lightning daemons
• Celebrate the success of this tutorial with a cold bottle of beer.