Password shown in plain text

[ngschaider]

Currently the password is specified in plain text when invoking mcrcon.
Example:
./mcrcon -H localhost -P 25575 -p MY_PASSWORD

This obviously allows anyone to see the password on the screen while typing it in and also saves the password to ~/.bash_history.
A solution to this is to allow entering the password via a prompt when -p is not specified.

Pull Request #50 implements this kind of prompt (haven't tested it yet, but looks very promising)

[Tiiffi]

This is a good idea. It has been on TODO list for a long time.

I have to do some testing and see what library dependencies it introduces (trying to keep it minimal).

[jnovack]

Prompting definitely rules out the "server maintenance scripts" portion of the raison-d'etre.

Preferred methods for automation would be passing a filename (where the password is in the file) as a variable (e.g Docker Secrets method), or as an environment variable.

~/.bash_history is user file in a user directory, if you have other users looking at your .bash_history, you have additional issues, and I do not believe to be a concern of a user-space application. I believe you meant to say that adding a value on the command line exposes it via ps -aux (or ps -ef, your choice), which is a valid concern.

[clemisch]

Can't you just use this?

./mcrcon -H localhost -P 25575 -p $(cat /path/to/pw/file)

[Thom1729]

For what it's worth, the password and port are both stored in plaintext in the server.properties file. So if a script has read access to that file, then in principle it can grab those values from that file rather than hard-coding them.

It might be a useful feature for mcrcon to take an arg pointing to a server.properties file and reading the port and password from there. This would require parsing the file, but that's not too complicated.

[alext]

The server.properties file is pretty easy to parse with awk, so you could do something like:

./mcrcon -H localhost -p "$(awk -F '=' '$1 == "rcon.password" { print $2; exit }' /path/to/server.properties)"