As stated by the help,
-server
Accept command line and JSON-RPC commands
You may however also have to check if this configuration parameter has been enabled by your local configuration, usually a file called bitcoin.conf, unless configured using the -conf parameter to bitcoind.
On linux builds, this should default to ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf, on Mac OS X ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
In this file, you can explicitly configure the server as off using the server configuration parameter.
server=0
You can alternatively pass a parameter as 1 (enabled) or 0 (disabled)
bitcoind -server=0
You should not be able to access your server assuming this has been toggled to 0.
The headless daemon bitcoind has the JSON-RPC API enabled by default, the GUI bitcoin-qt has it disabled by default.
Didn't know it was enabled by default, they never mentioned it in the docs. This makes sense, I've never actually tried setting it to 0, only removing it. Thanks. – zabbir – 2019-02-17T21:03:48.437
Pleasure. The documentation referring to this is here. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/JSON-RPC-interface.md
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