Running both bitcoind and bitcoin-qt for use with lightning I've been toying around with bitcoin &amp; lightning nodes.
I like having the Bitcoin Core Qt GUI around for things, but also like being able to change specific configuration / startup flags (maybe eventually contributing) with the source + bitcoind.
My proposed solution is to download Qt GUI (current version 0.20.1) and then get the same version from github and share the same bitcoin chain database.
To do this, I want to have the same version. Is this as easy as:
# I downloaded 0.20.1 .dmg file from Bitcoin Core and installed it, thus I need that tag from Github
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
git checkout tags/0.20.1
# ... do build here

Then, depending on what I'm doing I run either 1) Qt, or 2) bitcoind, but never at same time.
Any additional steps I need to do to check the versions are the same? Is there an easier way to achieve this? Maybe it's just safer to build Qt stuff myself...
There's no particular issues with running both the daemon and the QT using the same data directory, you're also protected against running them both at once due to locking. Most versions, especially within a single major release, are compatible so there's no burning concern about keeping them exactly in sync with one another.