WEBCAT(1)

📦 version 0.2.0, in nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable

🦋 WEBCAT(1) — the webcat manual, bestie edition 🦋

okay so this is the <pink>webcat(1) page, and no cap, it's lowkey the most useful little tool ever. let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

webcat — the swiss army knife for websocket, fr fr 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

webcat [OPTIONS]

that's it. that's the whole vibe check. 🫶

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so webcat is a tool which is very similar to the well known netcat utility. like, they're giving sibling energy. 👑

It reads data from stdin and prints received data to stdout — iconic behaviour, honestly.

But instead of using raw TCP connections, webcat uses the websocket protocol (RFC6455). the way that it just upgrades your whole connection into a websocket... main character energy honestly ✨

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -H HEADER — set a request header in the form NAME=VALUE. this header gets sent in the initial HTTP request, which is then upgraded to a websocket connection. very demure, very HTTP 💅
  • -f SHA256 VALUE — set the expected SHA256 value of the server certificate 🔐. ngl this one is important: the hashsum is calculated over the whole certificate in DER encoding. don't skip that part bestie.
  • -k SECONDS — send websocket keep alive probes every SECONDS seconds ⏰. it's giving "just checking in!!" energy, but make it protocol-level.
  • -l ADDRESS — be a server and listen on this address 👑. you're not just the client anymore, you ARE the moment.
  • -t TARGET — connect to TARGET. and here's the tea: when in server mode and target is not - (which means stdout), then the incoming connection is proxied to TARGET. 🧚

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

For using an SSH through websocket see this blog article:

https://rumpelsepp.org/blog/ssh-through-websocket/

like go read it, it's literally right there 🔥

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Maintained by Stefan Tatschner stefan@rumpelsepp.org. 🫶

The Git repository is hosted here:

https://github.com/rumpelsepp/webcat

ok bestie you're all caught up, go websocket something iconic ✨ 💖

and yes, this page is dated 1980-01-01 and it's the WEBCAT(1) manual — a little time capsule moment, periodt. 💅🎀

📦 where this page comes from