fips/docs/reference/cli-fipsctl.md

fipsctl

Command-line client for the FIPS daemon's control socket.

Synopsis

fipsctl [-s SOCKET] <subcommand> [args...]

Description

fipsctl connects to a running daemon over its control socket (Unix domain socket on Linux/macOS, TCP loopback on Windows), sends one JSON request, and pretty-prints the response. Exits with a non-zero status if the socket cannot be reached, the daemon returns an error, or the request times out.

fipsctl keygen and fipsctl address are special cases: they do not contact the daemon and operate purely on local files.

For the line-delimited JSON wire protocol, see control-socket.md. For the YAML configuration that defines the socket location, see configuration.md.

Global Options

Flag	Argument	Description
-s, --socket	PATH	Override the control-socket path (Linux/macOS) or TCP port (Windows).
-V	—	Print the short version, <version> (rev <git-hash>).
--version	—	Print the long version: short version plus build target triple.
-h, --help	—	Print usage and exit. Per-subcommand help via fipsctl <subcommand> --help.

Subcommands

show <what>

Read-only queries against the daemon. Each subcommand maps 1:1 to a control-socket query (see control-socket.md) and prints the response's data object as pretty JSON.

Subcommand	Control-socket command	Returns
show status	show_status	Node-level status: identity, version, peer/link/session counts, TUN state, recent sparklines.
show peers	show_peers	Authenticated peer list with link IDs, transport addresses, MMP metrics, Noise/rekey state.
show links	show_links	Active links (one per FMP-authenticated peer): direction, state, byte counters.
show tree	show_tree	Spanning-tree state: root, my coordinates, parent, peer declarations.
show sessions	show_sessions	End-to-end FSP sessions: state, traffic counters, session-MMP metrics, path MTU.
show bloom	show_bloom	Bloom-filter state: own filter sequence, leaf dependents, per-peer filter summaries.
show mmp	show_mmp	MMP metrics summary: per-peer link-layer metrics and per-session session-layer metrics.
show cache	show_cache	Coordinate cache: TTL, fill ratio, per-destination coords and path MTU.
show connections	show_connections	Pending handshake connections: state, idle time, resend count.
show transports	show_transports	Transport instances: type, state, MTU, local address, per-transport stats.
show routing	show_routing	Routing summary: pending lookups, retry state, forwarding/discovery/error/congestion counters.
show identity-cache	show_identity_cache	Cached (node_addr → npub) entries with last-seen timestamps.
show native-flows	show_native_flows	Native datagram API: open and pending flows with their ports, queue depth and age, bound listeners with their backlog, and the native counters.

acl <what>

Subcommand	Control-socket command	Returns
acl show	show_acl	Loaded peer-ACL state: allow/deny files, effective mode, default decision, entry counts.

stats <what>

Time-series metrics from the in-process history rings.

Subcommand	Control-socket command	Description
stats list	show_stats_list	Enumerate available metrics, their units, and the per-ring retention windows.
stats metrics	show_metrics	Dump current counter values for every protocol metric family (forwarding, discovery, tree, bloom, congestion, errors, native).
stats peers	show_stats_peers	List peers tracked in stats history (active or recently active).
stats history <metric> [options]	show_stats_history	Fetch a time-series window for one metric.

stats history options:

Flag	Argument	Default	Description
--peer	npub or hostname	(none)	Required for per-peer metrics; resolves through /etc/fips/hosts if not an npub.
--window	<N>s / <N>m / <N>h	10m	Window duration.
--granularity	1s or 1m	1s	Ring resolution. 1s uses the fast ring; 1m uses the slow ring.
--plot	—	off	Render a Unicode-block sparkline to stdout instead of JSON.

keygen [options]

Generate a new FIPS identity keypair locally. Does not contact the daemon.

Flag	Argument	Default	Description
-d, --dir	DIR	/usr/local/etc/fips (macOS, FreeBSD), /etc/fips (other Unix), %APPDATA%\fips (Windows)	Output directory for fips.key and fips.pub. Matches the directory the platform's packaging installs config into, which is where the daemon derives the key paths from.
-f, --force	—	off	Overwrite an existing fips.key.
-s, --stdout	—	off	Print nsec then npub to stdout instead of writing files.

fips.key is written with mode 0600 and fips.pub with mode 0644 on Unix. After running keygen, set node.identity.persistent: true in fips.yaml or the daemon will overwrite the keys on next start.

address [identity] [options]

Print a node's mesh address (fd00::/8) and nothing else, so it can be captured in a shell substitution. Does not contact the daemon, which makes it usable from an installer or image build where no node is running.

Argument	Description
identity	npub (bech32) or hostname from /etc/fips/hosts. Omit to use this node's own identity.

Flag	Argument	Default	Description
-k, --key	PATH	(none)	Derive from this key file (an nsec) or public key file (an npub). Conflicts with identity.

With neither an identity nor --key, the address comes from fips.key in the default key directory (the same directory keygen writes to), falling back to fips.pub beside it, since fips.key is mode 0600 and an unprivileged run cannot read it.

The address is derived from the public key exactly as the daemon derives its own: fd followed by the first 15 bytes of SHA-256(pubkey).

connect <peer> <address> <transport>

Tell the daemon to dial a peer over a specific transport.

Argument	Description
peer	npub (bech32) or hostname from /etc/fips/hosts.
address	Transport endpoint, e.g. 192.168.1.10:2121, [2001:db8::1]:2121, or a Tor onion. FIPS-mesh ULAs (fd00::/8) are rejected for the IP-based transports (udp, tcp, ethernet).
transport	One of udp, tcp, tor, nym, ethernet. The named transport must be configured and running.

disconnect <peer>

Tell the daemon to drop a peer link.

Argument	Description
peer	npub (bech32) or hostname from /etc/fips/hosts.

probe <target>

Diagnose whether a mesh endpoint is reachable, in five stages, and report a per-stage verdict so a partial failure localizes itself.

Argument	Description
target	npub (bech32) or hostname from /etc/fips/hosts.
--json	Emit the report as JSON instead of human-readable text.
--timeout <secs>	Client-side ceiling. Defaults to the budget the daemon computed, which scales with its tick interval.

The stages are:

1. bloom — does any peer's announced filter claim the target, and did a LookupRequest therefore go out? A miss ends the probe here and is a statement about the mesh's own knowledge: nobody has heard of this address. Skipped when the coordinates are already cached, and when the target is a directly connected peer.
2. discovery — waiting for a LookupResponse to answer with coordinates. Each request the node sends gets its own line under the stage, with the timeout that attempt was given and whether it drew a reply. Failing here is the opposite finding to a bloom miss: a peer's filter did claim the address, and nothing answered for it.
3. path — the least-common-ancestor walk between the two coordinates, plus the next hop this node would select. This is a local computation, not a traceroute: no hop beyond the first is contacted, and the tree distance is an upper bound on the real hop count because a crosslink cut-through can deliver in fewer hops. When no coordinates were available the walk is not computed at all: path.coords_known is false and every tree field is null, rather than a default that would read as a finding about the spanning tree.
4. session — a full Noise XK handshake over FSP. Completing it is genuine end-to-end evidence: our route reached them, their route reached us, and the remote holds the expected static key.
5. rtt — one MMP sender/receiver report exchange, for a real round-trip time.

Exit status is 0 only for an overall verdict of ok; partial, failed and cancelled all exit 1.

The stage block fills in as the probe runs. Each stage reports its verdict at the moment it reaches one, rather than the whole report arriving at the end, so a slow stage is visible as the stage that is slow. On a terminal the block is redrawn in place, with a spinner and a running elapsed on whichever stage is working; piped or redirected, each row is printed once, when it settles, and the transcript ends up the same block. A running stage reports only what the daemon has observed — which requests have gone unanswered so far, whether the handshake is in flight, how many receiver reports have arrived — and never previews an outcome it does not have yet. The per-request lines under the discovery stage carry the configured timeout of each attempt in parentheses, which is the node's own ladder rather than a measurement.

The elapsed column comes from the daemon's clock throughout: a finished stage carries its own tick-quantized figure, and the stage still running carries the report's elapsed less the stages already accounted for. Nothing in that column is measured client-side.

Stages that were never attempted get no row. A failure marks everything behind it as not reached, and the report says that once, in the failed row, rather than three more times. Two cases deliberately keep their rows: a skipped stage, because a skip is a result naming why that stage was unnecessary, and everything after a failed path stage, because the path preview touches nothing and the session can still succeed where the preview named no next hop.

Below the stage block, the path: line renders the whole tree walk on one line, from this node to the target, through the least common ancestor, which is emphasised on a terminal. It is the same computed walk the ours, theirs and tree walk lines describe, read in one piece.

--json is unaffected and still emits exactly one document, when the probe ends, so a script parsing the report does not have to skip past progress output.

What the probe leaves behind. It tears down a session it opened itself and never touches one that already existed. Three residues are deliberate and worth knowing about:

• The coordinate-cache and identity-cache entries a lookup produced are not evicted. They are TTL-bounded shared read caches, and evicting them could strand an unrelated flow mid-route.
• The remote's half of a probe-created session persists until its own idle timeout (default 90s). There is no teardown wire message. In the window between our removal and its idle purge, any session frame the remote sends lands here as one unknown-session reject.
• To obtain a round-trip time the probe sends a CoordsWarmup, which starts MMP reporting on the session. On a session the probe does not own, that reporting continues until the idle purge — the same traffic any single data packet would cause, and bounded, but a real change to a session the probe did not create. The report names it under cleanup.warmups_sent.

Running a probe against a production node is safe: the job carries its own deadline daemon-side, so it cleans up whether or not the client is still there.

profile tick <on|off|status>

Reading the output. Step durations are wall clock measured across await points, not CPU time: a step that waits on I/O accrues that wait, and other tasks may run inside the span. That is the intended measure for head-of-line delay, and it means a large step is not necessarily an expensive one. arm_starvation is measured directly as the entry time minus the deadline the interval scheduled that tick for. It is not derived from tick_entry_gap, which carries no starvation signal on its own: under a steady delay every gap is exactly one tick period.

Start, stop and inspect a capture of the rx-loop tick body. Present only when both fipsctl and the daemon are built with --features profiling; the feature is off by default, so a stock package does not carry this subcommand and a stock daemon reports profile_tick_* as an unknown command.

Subcommand	Control-socket command	Description
profile tick on	profile_tick_on	Create the capture file and start recording. Fails if a capture is already running (naming the active file) or if the directory cannot be written.
profile tick off	profile_tick_off	Stop the capture. The writer is woken immediately, drains once more and is joined, so the command returns promptly. Succeeds, reporting nothing active, when no capture is running.
profile tick status	profile_tick_status	Report idle, running, stopped_by_cap or stopped_by_error, plus the active path, bytes written, flush interval and byte cap.

profile tick on options:

Flag	Argument	Default	Description
--dir	directory path	/var/log/fips	Where to write the capture. Created if absent. Use it to profile a non-root cargo run.

Against a daemon running as root, --dir must name an absolute path under /var/log/fips, and a path that resolves outside it through a symlinked parent is refused. The control socket is reachable by the fips group, which the security model treats as strictly weaker than root, so a group member cannot steer a root directory creation at an arbitrary path. A daemon that is not running as root crosses no such boundary and takes --dir as given, which is what keeps a non-root cargo run capture working. Confining a root daemon's captures to a different log root is not currently supported.

One file is written per capture, named profile-<UTC timestamp>.tsv, with -1, -2 and so on appended if a capture in the same second already claimed the name. The capture file is created private to its owner and is never written over an existing file. It opens with a #-prefixed header block (node npub, build version, platform, configured tick period, flush interval, byte cap, start time), then a tab-separated column header, then one row per measured step per flush interval:

ts_unix  kind  domain  name  count  max  total  unit

kind is step for a timed span and gauge for a sampled scalar, so a gauge value never lands under a duration column; unit names the unit of max and total for that row. Every step present in the build gets a row every interval, including zero-count rows. Gauges cover ticks per interval, peer count, the wall gap between successive tick-arm entries, and the arm-starvation delay, which is measured against the deadline the tick was scheduled for rather than derived from the gap.

A capture stops itself on reaching 32 MB, appending a # line saying so; profile tick status then reports stopped_by_cap until the next on or off clears it.

Exit Codes

Code	Meaning
0	Daemon returned {"status":"ok",...}.
1	Argument parse failure, control-socket connection failure, daemon returned {"status":"error",...}, or local I/O failure (keygen). The error message is printed to stderr.

Environment

Variable	Description
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR	Used to derive the default control-socket path when /run/fips is absent.

fipsctl does not consume RUST_LOG; logging is for the daemon.

Files

Path	Purpose
/etc/fips/hosts	Maps hostnames to npubs for the connect, disconnect, and --peer arguments. See configuration.md.
Control socket (default)	Same resolution as the daemon: /run/fips/control.sock if present; then /var/run/fips/control.sock on macOS/FreeBSD if present; then $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/fips/control.sock; finally /tmp/fips-control.sock (Unix). A privileged macOS daemon bootstraps the private /var/run/fips directory. Windows uses TCP localhost:21210.

If you get Permission denied connecting to the socket on Linux, add your user to the fips group (sudo usermod -aG fips $USER) and log out and back in.

See also

• fips — the daemon.
• fipstop — live-status TUI.
• control-socket.md — wire protocol.
• configuration.md — YAML reference.