Feeding Plane.watch
If you wish to feed Plane.watch, follow the steps below.
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If you wish to feed Plane.watch, follow the steps below.
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Plane.watch is the end product of a Wouldn't it be cool if? statement. It is an ADS-B aggregation project by members of SDR-Enthusiasts. It is currently completely non-commercial, run by members of the community as a passion project, and backed by an Australian-based Not-for-Profit association.
The docker image contains the plane.watch feeder software and all of its required prerequisites and libraries. This needs to run in conjunction with ultrafeeder
(or another Beast provider).
Head over to and sign up for an account.
Login to , 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 below.
.env
fileInside your application directory (/opt/adsb
), edit the .env
file using your favourite text editor. Beginners may find the editor nano
easy to use:
This file holds all of the commonly used variables (such as our latitude, longitude and altitude). We're going to add our plane.watch variables to this file. Add the following lines to the file:
Replace YOURAPIKEY
with the API KEY that was provided the previous step.
For example:
Open the docker-compose.yml
file that was created when deploying ultrafeeder
.
Append the following lines to the end of the file (inside the services:
section):
To explain what's going on in this addition:
We're creating a container called planewatch
, from the image ghcr.io/plane-watch/docker-plane-watch:latest
.
We're passing several environment variables to the container:
BEASTHOST=ultrafeeder
to inform the feeder to get its ADSB data from the container ultrafeeder
over our private adsbnet
network.
LAT
will use the FEEDER_LAT
variable from your .env
file.
LONG
will use the FEEDER_LONG
variable from your .env
file.
ALT
will use the FEEDER_ALT_M
variable from your .env
file.
TZ
will use the FEEDER_TZ
variable from your .env
file.
API_KEY
will use the PW_API_KEY
variable from your .env
file.
We're using tmpfs
for volumes that have regular I/O. Any files stored in a tmpfs
mount are temporarily stored outside the container's writable layer. This helps to reduce:
The size of the container, by not writing changes to the underlying container; and
SD Card or SSD wear
Once the file has been updated, issue the command docker compose up -d
in the application directory to apply the changes and bring up the planewatch
container. You should see the following output:
You can see from the output above that the ultrafeeder
container was left alone (as the configuration for this container did not change), and a new container planewatch
was created.
We can view the logs for the environment with the command docker compose logs
, or continually "tail" them with docker compose logs -f
. We should now see logs from our newly created planewatch
container:
After a few minutes, browse to . Your feeder should be listed as "online". It can take up to 10 minutes for the status to update.
If you want to look at more options and examples for the plane.watch
container, you can find the repository .