planewatch/plane-watch

Docker container to feed ADS-B data into plane.watch. Designed to work in tandem with mikenye/readsb-protobuf or another BEAST provider. Builds and runs on x86, x86_64, arm32v6, arm32v7 & arm64v8.

The container pulls ADS-B data from a BEAST provider (and optionally ACARS/VDLM2 data from appropriate sources) and sends data to plane.watch.

plane.watch is a small group of friends and aviation enthusiasts who operate an ADS-B, ACARS and VDLM2 data collection and display service for the benefit of the general public. While we are primarily based in Australia, we welcome data contributions from all over the world. We are a non-commercial entity - no data is sold or filtered/blocked.

For more information, please join our Discord and say g'day.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfiles

• latest: built nightly from the main branch Dockerfile for all supported architectures.
• latest_nohealthcheck is the same as the latest version above. However, this version has the docker healthcheck removed. This is done for people running platforms (such as Nomad) that don't support manually disabling healthchecks, where healthchecks are not wanted.
• Specific version and architecture tags are available if required, however these are not regularly updated. It is generally recommended to run latest.

Getting Started

Register for a plane.watch feeder account

Head over to https://atc.plane.watch and sign up for an account.

Create your feeder

Login to https://atc.plane.watch, click on Feeders, + New Feeder. Fill out your details.

When you save your feeder, an API Key will be generated. Take note of this, as it will be required when deploying the feeder container.

Basic Up-and-Running with docker run

Our feeder container can be deployed with docker run as follows:

docker run \
  -d \
  --rm \
  --name planewatch \
  -e TZ=YOUR_TIMEZONE \
  -e BEASTHOST=YOUR_BEASTHOST \
  -e API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY \
  -e LAT=YOUR_LATITUDE \
  -e LONG=YOUR_LONGITUDE \
  -e ALT=YOUR_ALTITUDE \
  --tmpfs=/run:exec,size=64M \
  --tmpfs=/var/log \
  ghcr.io/plane-watch/docker-plane-watch:latest

Where:

• YOUR_TIMEZONE is your timezone in "TZ database name" format (eg: Australia/Perth)
• YOUR_BEASTHOST is the hostname, IP address or container name of a beast protocol provider (eg: piaware)
• YOUR_API_KEY is your plane.watch feeder API Key
• YOUR_LATITUDE is the latitude of your antenna (xx.xxxxx)
• YOUR_LONGITUDE is the longitude of your antenna (xx.xxxxx)
• YOUR_ALTITUDE is the your antenna altitude, and should be suffixed with either m or ft. If no suffix, will default to m.

You can test to ensure your container is seeing ADS-B data by running:

docker exec -it planewatch viewadsb

Basic Up-and-Running with Docker Compose

version: '3.8'

services:
  planewatch:
    image: ghcr.io/plane-watch/docker-plane-watch:latest
    tty: true
    container_name: planewatch
    restart: always
    environment:
      - BEASTHOST=YOUR_BEASTHOST
      - TZ=YOUR_TIMEZONE
      - API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY
      - LAT=YOUR_LATITUDE
      - LONG=YOUR_LONGITUDE
      - ALT=YOUR_ALTITUDE
    tmpfs:
      - /run:exec,size=64M
      - /var/log

Where:

• YOUR_TIMEZONE is your timezone in "TZ database name" format (eg: Australia/Perth)
• YOUR_BEASTHOST is the hostname, IP address or container name of a beast protocol provider (eg: piaware)
• YOUR_API_KEY is your plane.watch feeder API Key
• YOUR_LATITUDE is the latitude of your antenna (xx.xxxxx)
• YOUR_LONGITUDE is the longitude of your antenna (xx.xxxxx)
• YOUR_ALTITUDE is the your antenna altitude, and should be suffixed with either m or ft. If no suffix, will default to m.

You can test to ensure your container is seeing ADS-B data by running:

docker exec -it planewatch viewadsb

Runtime Environment Variables

There are a series of available environment variables:

Environment Variable	Purpose	Default
API_KEY	Required. Your plane.watch API Key
BEASTHOST	Required. IP, hostname or container name of a Mode-S/BEAST provider (readsb/dump1090)
BEASTPORT	Optional. TCP port number of Mode-S/BEAST provider (readsb/dump1090)	30005
LAT	Required for MLAT	Latitude of receiver antenna
LONG	Required for MLAT	Longitude of receiver antenna
ALT	Required for MLAT	Altitude of receiver antenna. Suffixed with ft or m.
ENABLE_MLAT	Optional. Set to false to disable MLAT	true
MLAT_DATASOURCE	Optional. IP/Hostname and port of an MLAT data source	BEASTHOST:BEASTPORT setting if omitted
TZ	Optional. Your local timezone	GMT

Ports

No ports are required to be mapped to this container.

Logging

• All processes are logged to the container's stdout, and can be viewed with docker logs [-f] container.

Getting help

Please feel free to:

• Open an issue on the project's GitHub.
• Join our Discord and say g'day.

Changelog

See the commit history on GitHub.