rcon is a command line application that can be used as a Source RCON client. It will send commands to the given server, and print the reply to stdout.

Installation

Homebrew

@Holek has made a homebrew tap for rcon, which you can use like this:

$ brew install Holek/rcon/rcon

Manual Installation

You require libbsd, check, cmake and glib-2.0 to successfully build rcon. You have to install those from your distribution's repository. If you wish to compile the ncurses based version, you will also need the ncurses. For example:

• In Debian you'd do something like this:

$ apt-get install build-essential cmake check libbsd-dev libglib2.0-dev [libncurses5-dev]

• In Fedora you'd do something like this:

$ dnf install @c-development cmake check-devel libbsd-devel glib2-devel [ncurses-devel]

Then build the project:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

A bash-completion script is available, but not installed by default. If you use bash completion simply specify INSTALL_BASH_COMPLETION=ON on the cmake command line:

$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DINSTALL_BASH_COMPLETION=ON

Debian package

If you prefer to build a Ubuntu/Debian package out of the source code: You can! Just run the following command in the source code:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us

You will need the dpkg-dev package of course, which contains dpkg-buildpackage, and all the dependencies as they are listed in the manual installation section above.

Documentation

The utility comes with a man page: rcon(1). View it with: man 1 rcon.

Usage

Command Line

The command can be called from the command line directly, like so:

$ rcon -H somehost -p someport -P somepass status

rcon automatically concats all your arguments together into one command:

$ rcon -H somehost -p someport -P somepass sm plugins list

This sends the command "sm plugins list" to the server.

Standard Input

If you wish to send more than one command to the server, don't specify one on the command line. Instead give rcon a list of commands through standard input:

$ rcon -H somehost -p someport -P somepass <<EOS
status
sm plugins list
# This might be long!
cvarlist
EOS

In this mode lines starting with # are ignored. This allows rcon to be used as a script interpreter. Just pass it the script file through stdin:

$ cat somescript.txt
# This is a comment
status

# and this too!
sm plugins list

cvarlist

And execute your script like this:

$ rcon -H somehost -p someport -P somepass < somescript.txt
# Or:
$ cat somescript.txt | rcon -H somehost -p someport -P somepass

Exit Code

The command exit with 0 on success, and some arbitrary non-zero exit code on failure.

Config file

You can also store your server credentials in a configuration file. The default location for this file is $HOME/.rconrc. You can specify an alternate configuration file through the -c option. Entries from this configuration file are referenced through the -s option.

Here is an example configuration file:

[somehost]
hostname = 174.53.163.41
port = 27045
password = somepass
# remove the following line if the server
# is not minecraft, or set it to 'false'
minecraft = true

Now you can do:

$ rcon -s somehost status

Notable Forks

dad's variant is a fork of rcon that offers an ncurses interface. Perfect for running it in a local or remote shell.

See Also

• RCON Protocol Specification

Note regarding rcon security

The rcom protocol transmits everything (including your rcon password) un-encrypted. Thus, anyone with access to your internet connection could conceivably capture your password and/or monitor your rcon traffic. If this is a concern to you, you may wish to tunnel your rcon connection through ssh or some other secure VPN running on your server. For example, the following command will connect to the remote server using ssh and then run rcon on the remote server (rcon will connect to the server locally without exiting the server's firewall).

ssh -t someuser@174.53.163.41 rcon --host 174.53.163.41 --port 27045 --password somepass