// the find
owntracks/recorder
Store and access data published by OwnTracks apps
OwnTracks Recorder is the self-hosted backend for the OwnTracks location-sharing apps — it receives MQTT or HTTP location publishes, stores them as plain files, and exposes a REST API plus a live WebSocket map. It is for people running OwnTracks who want to own their own data instead of relying on a cloud service. The target audience is the self-hosting crowd comfortable with Linux and Mosquitto.
File-based storage with no external database dependency makes it easy to back up, inspect, and move data — a `.rec` file is just text. The LMDB geo cache is a smart design: reverse-geo lookups happen once per geohash cell and are reused forever, keeping API quota burn low. Lua hook support gives you a real escape hatch for custom logic without forking the C code. The build is genuinely lean — a single compiled binary that does MQTT subscriber, REST API, WebSocket server, and CLI query tool.
The build system is a hand-rolled Makefile with a `config.mk.in` you copy and edit before compiling — there is no configure script, no package manager, and the feature flags are baked in at compile time, so enabling or disabling MQTT or Lua means a full rebuild. Authentication is left entirely to a reverse proxy: the recorder itself has no auth at all, which means a misconfigured nginx exposes all location history publicly. The CI badge still points to Travis CI, which has been effectively dead for open source for years, so you have no idea if the build is actually green. The Docker image explicitly warns against HTTP mode with multiple users because the friends feature breaks — that is a real limitation if you want to containerize a multi-user setup.