Remote console/chat via WebSocket

[Mqxx]

Enhancement Type

A completely new feature

Describe the enhancement

Currently, the only way to connect to the server and send commands is to use the rcon-cli that your container provides. Rcon kinda sucks... And I mean specifically Rcon, not your implementation of rcon-cli. There is currently no better way to do it.

The problem with Rcon is that you can only retrieve the console output of the command you just ran, not the entire console output. This makes it difficult, for example, to build a WebUI or other applications that require the entire output. I think this is also the reason why many people currently rely on technologies like Screen or Tmux (which I also used before). Simply to get the live console.

It would be really great if you could implement a WebSocket hook that directly accesses the console in the server from the container so that you can get a live stream of the console and also send commands via WebSocket.

This way it would be possible to build better management tools that use this container to manage the server.

Thanks for consideration 🙂

[itzg]

I agree with the frustrations with RCON, but then it's just doing the command-response that it's designed for.

A websocket interface makes sense especially since docker and kubernetes use that to enable programmatic access to interact with containers. Speaking of which, keep in mind that the output of the Minecraft server can always be remotely retrieved via docker/kubernetes logs.

It could be done similar to itzg/mc-server-runner#56

To set expectations, unless someone contributes this feature, I can't guarantee I'll add this any time soon or ever.