Flight radar

Fetches ADS-B flight data from radar servers (ModeSMixer2 or Virtual Radar Server) and presents a chronological view of past flights with an interactive live map of position reports. Built with FastAPI

Impressions

Ovierview of past flights

Flight path visualization

Prerequisites

1. Make sure you have Python 3 installed,
2. Install the dependencies package with pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

The application can either be configured by enviroment variables or by a config file

Config file

1. Copy the config.json from contrib/samples to the project root
2. Configure host/port of your radar server
3. Choose whether you want to track military planes only
4. Configure MongoDB as your database (see Database Configuration below)

Enviroment variables

See section below for details

• DATA_FOLDER
• SERVICE_URL
• SERVICE_TYPE
• MIL_ONLY
• DB_RETENTION_MIN
• UNKNOWN_AIRCRAFT_CRAWLING
• MONGODB_URI
• MONGODB_DB_NAME

Database Configuration

The application uses MongoDB for data storage, with time-series collections for efficient position data storage:

Configure MongoDB in your config.json:

"database": {
    "mongodb_uri": "mongodb://localhost:27017/",
    "mongodb_db_name": "flightradar"
}

Or set these environment variables:

MONGODB_URI=mongodb://localhost:27017/
MONGODB_DB_NAME=flightradar

Config options

Option name	Optional	Default value	Description
serviceUrl	no		The url to your radar service
type	yes	vrs	The type of your radar service, eithr vrs for VirtualRadarServer, mm2 for ModeSMixer2 or dmp1090 for dump1090
dataFolder	yes	resources	the absolute path to your resources folder
militaryOnly	yes	false	Whether everything other than military planes should be filtered (true or false)
deleteAfterMinutes	yes	1440	Determines how many minutes after the last signal was received should the the flight in the dababase be retained before it's deleted. Set to 0 to keep entries indefinitely
logging	yes		syslogHost The host to send logs to syslogFormat The syslog log format logLevel [optional] Log level, See here for more infos logToConsole [optional] If true, logs are logged to syslog and to console, if false only to syslog
crawlUnknownAircraft	yes	false	If true, aircraft not found in the database will be looked up in various data sources on the web. Since this method uses crawling which might not always be allowed, beware: This could potentially lead to blocking of your IP address
googleMapsApiKey	no		The map view needs an API key to render the map. You can get one here.

Running Flightradar

Initializing the database

Flightradar needs to initialize the MongoDB database schema before first use. When building a docker image, the database is initialized upon build time.

The app will create the required collections and indexes in the specified MongoDB database, including time-series collections for efficient position data storage.

Initialize schema:

python flightradar.py initschema

Starting the application

Running it with the development server (Not recommended for productive use). Don't forget to initialize the db (see above) before the first run:

uvicorn flightradar:app --reload

Running it with ASGI in production (recommended setup) (binds to all interfaces on port 8083):

uvicorn flightradar:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8083

Or using Gunicorn with Uvicorn workers:

gunicorn flightradar:app -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker --bind 0.0.0.0:8083

Using Windows

When running the application on Windows, consider the following:

• Use SET instead of export when using Windows

Known issues