Alternative to Life360?

powermaker450@discuss.tchncs.de to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 63 points –

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.

My Docker Compose file

My traccar.xml

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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:

  • TrackerID: 1
  • DeviceID: Phone
  • UserID: mb
  • URL: https://mytraccarserver.com:5144 (the port itself is HTTP-only IIRC, but I've mapped Traefik Proxy in front of it which handles HTTPS)

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!