// the take
rcon-cli is a Go command-line client for the Source/Valve RCON protocol (plus telnet and Rust's web-rcon variant), letting you run admin commands against game servers like Minecraft, Rust, CS:GO, and Project Zomboid. It's for server admins who want to script or script-adjacent manage their game servers from a shell or Docker container rather than connecting with a GUI tool.
Supports three distinct protocol variants (source-rcon, telnet, web) behind one CLI, which actually matters since 7 Days to Die and Rust don't speak standard RCON. The YAML config with named environments and per-environment logging is a genuinely useful touch for anyone running multiple servers. It's a thin, focused wrapper around the gorcon/rcon-cli author's own lower-level rcon Go library, so the protocol handling isn't reinvented here. Has CI, a Go Report Card badge, and Docker images published, so it's not just a weekend script someone forgot about.
684 stars and 63 forks for something that's been around years suggests a small, static userbase rather than momentum — check last meaningful feature commit, not just last push. The password lives in plaintext in rcon.yaml with no mention of file permissions or secrets management, which is a real problem if you're committing configs or running in shared environments. No mention of TLS or any transport security, which is inherent to the RCON protocol itself but worth knowing before exposing a server port. The supported-games list is crowdsourced via PRs with no actual compatibility testing described, so 'supported' really means 'someone claimed it worked once.'
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →