[chimerax-users] Starting ChimeraX programmatically with remotecontrol

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Mungo!
There is a “Remote Control” tool (menu under Tools… General) and “remotecontrol” command, both currently undocumented, sorry.  Needed a programmer to write up this information in more detail.  

Starting the tool from the Tools menu appears to do nothing other than report in the Log that an xmlrpc server is running, but entering command “usage remotecontrol” will show a bit more information in the Log that might be enough to get you started using the command instead.

Currently when I do that I see:

remotecontrol rest port
    — Report REST server port

remotecontrol rest start [port an integer] [ssl true or false]
    — Start REST server

remotecontrol rest stop [quiet true or false]
    — Stop REST server

remotecontrol xmlrpc enable [address a text string] [port an integer][timeout a number]
    — Allow other processes to send XMLRPC commands to ChimeraX 
  enable: true or false

…so there are indeed options for REST server communication.  I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco


> On Dec 10, 2019, at 8:10 AM, Mungo Carstairs (Staff) <g.m.carstairs at dundee.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> Jalview has the ability to launch Chimera with "--start RESTServer", capture the port number from the response, and drive Chimera with REST commands.
> 
> I'm trying to figure out whether this mechanism is also provided with ChimeraX. I've read 
> http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimerax-users/2017-July/000113.html
> and looked at 
> http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/startup.html
> and
> http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/options.html#start
> but so far I can't see that "RESTServer" is a startable tool.
> 
> Is this, or is it planned to be, possible somehow?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mungo