// the find
wiedehopf/tar1090
Provides an improved webinterface for use with ADS-B decoders readsb / dump1090-fa
tar1090 is a replacement web UI for ADS-B receivers running readsb or dump1090-fa, aimed at hobbyists tracking aircraft from RTL-SDR dongles on Raspberry Pi or similar Linux hardware. It adds configurable track history, multi-aircraft selection, heatmaps, pTracks coverage visualization, and multiple map layers on top of whatever decoder you're already running.
- The pTracks/heatmap feature is genuinely useful for evaluating antenna placement and receiver coverage — renders hours of accumulated tracks in the browser with altitude filtering and configurable density.
- Multiple instance support from a single install is well thought out: one config file drives parallel deployments with separate history retention, useful for running 978 MHz UAT alongside 1090.
- Active real-world deployment at scale — globe.adsbexchange.com, adsb.lol, and similar aggregators use this as their frontend, which means the rendering performance with hundreds of concurrent aircraft has actually been tested under load.
- The install/update/uninstall scripts are idempotent and preserve config, which is more than most hobbyist projects bother with.
- Configuration is a mess of manual file edits and sed one-liners scattered throughout the README — there's no single config UI or structured config file format, and editing config.js directly means updates can silently clobber your changes.
- No changelog. The README literally says 'the commit log is the only changelog' and mocks users who want one. Upgrading is a black box and the data format is explicitly documented as unstable.
- The JavaScript codebase is a single large script.js with globals everywhere and no build system — contributing or modifying it is painful, and there's no test coverage.
- The curl-pipe-to-bash install pattern combined with no package signing means you're trusting whatever is on that GitHub URL at install time, which is a real concern for something that runs as root and touches nginx/lighttpd config.