I want to set up location sharing for my family/friends, but
- without having a closed source app having access to my location/sensors all the time
- be able to choose when I want to share
Any recommendations?
Edit for those who find this later: I ended up choosing Traccar suggested by @mbirth@lemmy.ml, but big thanks to everyone who brought some ideas to the table! I’ll leave my configs here.
After Google Latitude shut down, I went with OwnTracks logging into the light-weight php-owntracks-recorder.
I’ve since migrated that to Traccar (normally used for car fleet management) on server-side and am still using OwnTracks to push the location updates from my iPhone.
OwnTracks setup was a bit confusing to me and I never got it working. traccar looks pretty nice though, I’ll check it out!
I’m using OwnTracks in HTTP mode as I couldn’t be bothered with MQTT. For that, you only need the HTTP(S) endpoint/URL to log to, optionally user credentials and then it’s a “TrackerID”, “UserID” and “DeviceID” so the receiving server knows who’s talking.
Side note: Traccar uses different ports to receive different protocols. For OwnTracks protocol, the correct port is 5144.
My OwnTracks configuration is basically like this:
I tried both MQTT and just the plain HTTP variant, and I couldn’t get either to work. I’ve fully settled on the latter you mentioned, Traccar. it’s pretty much what I’ve wanted: self-hosted, easy to set up, beautiful web interface. Thanks for the suggestions!