Q3Rcon

Send rcon commands to Q3 compatible servers.

For an outline of past/future changes refer to: CHANGELOG

Requirements

• The game must implement RCON using the Q3 protocol.

Background

Quake3 Rcon works by firing UDP packets to the game server port, responses may be returned at once or in fragments (depending on the size of the response). For this reason I've made this package quite flexible, timeouts for responses can be set by request kind using a timeouts map. The default timeout for a response is 20ms, although this can be changed as well.

Rcon itself is insecure and each packet includes the password so I don't suggest using it remotely. If you have direct access to the server then SSH in first, then use this tool locally.

Use

go get github.com/onyx-and-iris/q3rcon

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"log"

	"github.com/onyx-and-iris/q3rcon"
)

func main() {
	var (
		host     string = "localhost"
		port     int    = 30000
		password string = "rconpassword"
	)

	rcon, err := q3rcon.New(host, port, password)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer rcon.Close()

	resp, err := rcon.Send("mapname")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp)
}

WithLoginTimeout(timeout time.Duration)

If the server was just started or is currently performing a long operation like map rotating then it's possible to receive empty rcon responses. In which case you'll want to retry login. Use this functional option to set the max timeout for logins, it defaults to 5 seconds.

For example:

rcon, err := q3rcon.New(
	host, port, password,
	q3rcon.WithLoginTimeout(2*time.Second))

WithDefaultTimeout(timeout time.Duration)

You may want to change the default timeout if some of your responses are getting mixed together (stability can depend on connection to the server). For example, over localhost I can leave the default at 20ms, when connecting remotely I normally increase this to 50ms.

For example:

rcon, err := q3rcon.New(
	host, port, password,
	q3rcon.WithDefaultTimeout(50*time.Millisecond))

WithTimeouts(timeouts map[string]time.Duration)

Perhaps there are some requests that take a long time to receive a response but you want the whole response in one chunk. Pass a timeouts map, for example:

timeouts := map[string]time.Duration{
	"map_rotate":  1200 * time.Millisecond,
	"map_restart": 1200 * time.Millisecond,
}

rcon, err := q3rcon.New(
	host, port, password,
	q3rcon.WithTimeouts(timeouts))

Command line

Pass host, port and password as flags, for example:

q3rcon -h=localhost -p=30000 -P="rconpassword" "mapname"

• host defaults to "localhost"
• port defaults to 28960
• password defaults to ""

Arguments following the flags will be sent as rcon commands. You may send multiple arguments.

Interactive mode

Pass interactive (-i shorthand) flag to enable interactive mode, for example:

q3rcon -h=localhost -p=30000 -P="rconpassword" -i

If interactive mode is enabled, any arguments sent on the command line will be ignored.

Your own implementation

The included CLI is a generic implementation, while it can be used out of the box you may find that some requests result in fragmented responses. The solution is to implement your own version, adjusting the timings with the functional options as detailed above. I could have increased the default timeouts but that would add unnecessary delay for most requests, so I decided to leave those details to the users of the package.

Since you can include the q3rcon package into your own package you can easily make your own modifications, for example, I added colour to the terminal and reformatted some of the responses.

Logging

Log level may be set by passing the -l flag with a number from 0 up to 6 where

0 = Panic, 1 = Fatal, 2 = Error, 3 = Warning, 4 = Info, 5 = Debug, 6 = Trace