If your machine doesn't have telnet installed, good for you. You can also use Netcat to connect.

I honestly don't remember what exactly was going through my head in 2013 when I wrote the original version of this service. I imagine that I felt then -- as I do now -- that rickrolld represents the zenith of Rickrolling humor.

rickrolld was written in Tcl 8.5 and was bespoke to my favored-at-the-time FreeBSD environment. The script relied on inetd, tcpwrappers, and tcllauncher to function. In 2022 I decommissioned the last of my FreeBSD servers and lost the enviroment I needed to keep rickrolld running and it went silent.

In June 2025 I rewrote the server in Golang, then got it containerized for an easier deployment in modern infrastructure. Special thanks to Michael Hazell for reminding me to get it finished.

The code from back then is a time capsule from a different era. From before Linux and containers took over the Internet. It's old enough to have been 3-Clause BSD licensed. I remember having strong feelings about that at the time. I changed it to MIT as part of the rewrite.

This service will bind port 23 and listen as a telnet server. Incoming connections will be textually serenaded.

You can build and run locally straight from this repo if you have Golang installed.

Images are on dockerhub at nugget/rickrolld

Or use the docker-compse.yml file from this repo.

You can build/tag the rickrolld container locally tagged as rickrolld:dev

These environment variables can be set to override default values: