Installing PiAware on RPi4

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Hello

I’m following through an article in the wonderful PC Pro magazine (issue 309). Rather than using a fresh PiAware image, I was hoping to add the necessary parts to my existing RPi 4 (running Buster) to which I’ve already attached a Nooelec Smartee USB antenna. GQRX is working (having stopped the piaware and dump1090-fa services).

I installed piaware, dump1090-fa and the other bits per the guidance at PiAware - dump1090 ADS-B integration with FlightAware - FlightAware. I was able to connect to FlightAware. It agrees that I’m sending them data. I can also verify this from my Windows PC using a utility I found (view1090.exe).

The only thing I can’t do is see my local map via :8080. Running ‘sudo netstat -tlnp | grep 8080’ returns no result, which I think means there’s nothing available on that port. Running ‘ps -e | grep dump1090’ returns dump1090-fa only.

I don’t want to break the parts that are already working. Any guidance as to what final tweaks might be required for the local web service to work will be much appreciated. Is it a matter of creating or amending a configuration file?

Many thanks

2

The map is usually served via lighttpd. Do you have another webserver running that would conflict?

1 Like
3

I do indeed - Apache.

So I stopped the apache2 service and started lighttpd and lo, all was revealed. Marvellous.

Thank you for the very quick and helpful response.

Is there a page you can point me to that would guide me in reconfiguring to use Apache? That’s just a ‘nice to know’ since I can make notes and take the simple steps above if required.

Thanks again and best wishes

4

I don’t have specific instructions for Apache, but it should be fairly straightforward. You basically just need to provide an equivalent to these aliases: https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090/blob/master/debian/lighttpd/89-dump1090-fa.conf#L5

That is, make the contents of /usr/share/dump1090-fa/html/ available under some URL /X/, and make the contents of /run/dump1090-fa/ available under /X/data/. The files under /run/dump1090-fa/ change frequently so avoid caching those.

1 Like
5

The question is if you need the Apache webserver for a different purpose. If not, simply leave it stopped.

If you want to keep it, you need to change the port the Apache is listening to.
This should help you going to right direction.

2 Likes
6

Many thanks to you both.

No, I guess I don’t really need Apache except for experimentation and learning. Time to learn about lighttpd as well.

I really appreciate the considered and accurate guidance since that stopped me fiddling around in ignorance and making things worse. All helps with the Linux learning curve.

Best wishes

7

Just change Apache to run on port 81, then lighttpd will run on 80 (and with the dump1090-fa config will also run on port 8080).
With separate ports you can try configuring Apache while still having a usable configuration for lighttpd.

I’d probably use nginx instead of apache, the configuration for nginx seams easier for me (i haven’t tried much apache though).

A basic nginx location directive to serve the webinterface at /dump1090-fa would look like this:

location /dump1090-fa {
  alias /usr/share/dump1090-fa/html;
  try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
location /dump1090-fa/data/ {
  alias /run/dump1090-fa/;
}

The try_files $uri $uri/ =404; is just to make sure /dump1090-fa works just as well as /dump1090-fa/

2 Likes
8

Thank you very much for the suggestions. Time to look at nginx as well - I am, by the way, trying to find a good web server host for the .NET Core Blazor applications that I’m playing with. From a brief search, it looks like nginx might well be a contender.

So much to learn and, these days, so much time.

Thanks again

9

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