RCON (Remote CONsole) is a remote access protocol, built into every Minecraft server. It allows connecting to the server remotely and running server commands. If the server is running as a background process (daemon), there’s really no other way of communicating with it.
To succesfully set up the RCON connection you need these things:
- Setup RCON in server configuration
- A RCON client
RCON is disabled by default. You need to enable it in the server.properties config file (in the root directory of Minecraft server) , by adding the following lines:
rcon.port=25575 rcon.password=AVeryStrongPassword enable-rcon=true
You also need a special RCON client to communicate with Minecraft server via RCON protocol. A Telnet or SSH client (such as PuTTY) won’t do! Good people of this world created free RCON clients for Linux and Windows, specifically for Minecraft server (it can handle Bukkit/Spigot server color codes), called mcrcon. It’s available on this link.