// the find
Freika/dawarich
Your favorite self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline (Google Location History)
Dawarich is a self-hosted Rails app that replaces Google Timeline — you point OwnTracks, GPSLogger, or your phone's native Dawarich client at it, and it stores, visualizes, and analyzes your location history. It's for the privacy-conscious homelab crowd who wants their movement data off Google's servers without giving up the timeline UX they're used to.
The import breadth is genuinely good: Google Takeout, OwnTracks, GPX, GeoJSON, Strava, and EXIF from photos all work, so you don't lose historical data when migrating. The Immich/Photoprism integration to overlay geotagged photos on the map is a nice touch that most timeline alternatives skip. Active development (last push yesterday), 9k stars, Discord community, and a managed cloud option all signal this isn't abandoned vaporware. The 'days in country' feature for tax residency tracking is a practical differentiator you don't see elsewhere.
The README explicitly warns not to auto-update and to read every release before upgrading — that's a red flag for database migration stability; breaking changes are clearly common enough to warrant a disclaimer. Visits detection is still in beta with manual confirm/reject workflow, which means the core 'where did I go' feature isn't reliable enough to trust yet. Ruby on Rails with a full Postgres stack is heavier than this use case needs — a homelab NAS running this on 1GB RAM will struggle, and there's no lightweight deployment path. The disclaimer to never delete your original source data implies the import pipeline has lost data before.