from danielgraf@discuss.tchncs.de to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 04 Jan 15:25
https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52145499
Hey everyone, I’m Daniel.
On June 5, 2025, I pushed v1.0.0 of Reitti. My goal was personal: I wanted to track my movements so that I could look back a year later and easily bring back memories of where I had been and what I had done. I wanted that “Time Machine” feeling, but I didn’t want to hand my entire life’s history over to another entity to get it.
Today, exactly 213 days and 46 releases later, I’m releasing v3.1.0.
The journey from a personal hobby to a community project has been wild:
- 1,191 Stars on GitHub.
- 404 Commits to main with 311 PRs merged.
- 250 Issues closed.
- 9 Languages supported.
What is Reitti?
“Reitti” is Finnish for “route” or “path.” It’s a personal location tracking and analysis application. It is fully local and private and no data ever leaves your server. You own the database, and you own the memories.
The Year in Review: Major Milestones
To reach that goal of “bringing back memories,” we had to build some serious infrastructure this year:
- The Memories Feature: This was the soul of the project this year. We moved beyond just “rows of data” to create beautiful travel logs that combine raw GPS data with images, text notes, and visit summaries.
- Deterministic Visit Detection: I’ve rewritten the processing pipeline multiple times. Handling raw GPS data is a struggle, debugging is a nightmare when one single “bounced” coordinate out of 10,000 can break a visit logic. We moved to a unified, deterministic engine to ensure your logs are accurate and noise-free.
- Advanced Sharing & Federation: We implemented “Magic Links” for external sharing, added sharing your data to other users and added support for cross-instance sharing, allowing you to see live locations on a single map of all your friends and family members.
New in v3.1.0:
- Polygon Boundaries for Places: Move beyond simple circular radiuses; define exact shapes for your significant places.
- OwnTracks Friend Data Support: Seamlessly integrate and view data from your friends directly in your OwnTracks App.
- Docker Secrets Support: Hardening security for your self-hosted setup.
- Dutch Language Support: Now supporting our 9th language!
Full v3.1.0 Release Notes: https://github.com/dedicatedcode/reitti/releases/tag/v3.1.0
A Heartfelt Thank You
This project isn’t just me anymore. I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who contributed this year. To the 15 contributors on GitHub who touched the code, and to the countless others who:
- Helped translate Reitti into 9 languages.
- Filled detailed issues and bug reports.
- Suggested features that shaped the direction of the app.
- Supported the project indirectly by sharing it with others.
You are the reason this project stayed healthy for 46 releases and I am looking forward what we can achieve in 2026
What’s Next?
I’m currently focusing on usability, mostly polishing the date selection and adding more configuration options. Long-term, I want to expand the Memories feature, possibly exploring local AI to help turn raw coordinate logs into natural-language travel diaries to make looking back even easier.
I appreciate your feedback and support! Here are a few ways to connect:
- Report Issues: Encountered a bug? Open an issue on GitHub Issues.
- Discuss on Lemmy: Message me on Lemmy.
- Connect on Reddit: Find me here.
- Support My Work: If you find this useful, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.
GitHub: https://github.com/dedicatedcode/reitti
Documentation: https://www.dedicatedcode.com/projects/reitti/
I’ll be in the comments to answer your questions.
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heck yeah!
The map you posted…that is a year of travel? You don’t get out much do you? LOL J/K If you were to track my travels, it’d be confined to 22 acres. I don’t get out much either. :)
The project looks great tho, and congratulations on the success of your app. I’ve often wondered where independent devs get their multiple languages from. 9 languages supported is pretty huge. Do you have people contribute translations, or is there a more structured avenue?
😆 yeah, that would not be that much for a year. Be assured, I get out alot besides the job and working on reitti.
The project is translated using weblate. I started with english (like every developer) and german (which is my main language). One of the LLM then started with finish and french. I do not speak either of these so could not estimate how good this was. French is already re-translated completely by two fellow users using weblate. All other languages where also added there.
It is a good tool but has some quirks when merging is involved. But I could not find anything better. Sometimes I also use it to enhance german, and it is working fine.
Awesome! In my younger days traveling, I picked up a few languages enough to get by, but that was decades ago and if you don’t use them you loose them. At one time I spoke patois fairly fluently which you would most likely hear in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic.
Time to level that up and add patois (never heard of it) to reitti 😀 But it is alot of work in keeping the translations aligned to new features and I am overly thankful for anyone who does this.
As I was younger, I could get away with Bulgarian but as you said. If you do not use it, you loose it.
I will see what I can do for the Finnish translation. Already found it on weblate.
I saw that someone is working on it. You are awesome. Thank you 🙏
Oh wow… I’m going to set this up right away, I’ve always loved this feature on google maps, but as I’ve been removing google from my life I was afraid of losing this but I definitely don’t want to give any more of my data. This is perfect! Thank you so much!
Edit: torilla tavataan i guess :)
If still available, reitti is able to import Google timeline data obtained via the Google Takeout. Sadly they dropped alot of user data earlier the last year. I was glad I, by accident, fetched it before hand.
Glad you like it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them.
How does it compare to DaWarIch which seems to be basically the same?
This questions comes up every time. I copied the answer i gave the last time at
www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/SUjvuDXd3k
Yes, this comes up most of the time when I post about it. Which is totally understandable since looking at it from the outside, they do the same in the sense of being an alternative to Google Timeline.
I have a vision where Reitti should be heading and this is not the timeline part. It will always be there to look at it, see your movement patterns, your visits and so on. Also the live view part, where you can share your location with others, with other users, instances or via magic link is one essential part which will always be there. Lot of users connect via this to their friends and families which is awesome when Reitti can help with this.
But, the Geo location is only the underlying data we need to create something which helps me (and maybe you) in remembering things. I “suffer” from Aphantasia and I struggle to get to my memories without any external trigger and that is the reason I created Reitti. To have a thing, i can occasionally look at, bring in pictures and emotions back into my knowledge. Where memories is the first step towards that goal.
So, for me this is the main difference between these two. But do not take my words for granted, test them out and take the one you like more. Since I started Reitti 6 months ago (actually a little bit longer) I did not follow on other projects that much and maybe they all converge to the same conclusion.
I am a little bit hesitant in adding a comparison in the Readme since I do not want to compare Reitti with other solutions. What I want more than a comparison is to make the idea behind Reitti clearer so anyone can build its own opinion which one is better suited.
I hope I got my point of view transported. English is not my main language and I did not bothered to let some LLM look over it.
If something needs more explanation, feel free to ask me anything.
It’s selfhosted and opensource :) afaik dawarlch isn’t.
Edit: it is. Sorry about that
This GitHub and the README in there say otherwise. Also the fact that I’ve got it running locally. 😉
Sorry 😐 missed that. Just skimmed the website
Any plans for an HA integration, maybe even as the source of the location data? I’ve been using HA for that and would prefer to not drain my phone battery further with two location services.
I wonder if OwnTracks can do it…
There is a Home Assistant integration by the community. Take a look at the readme, there is a link to the documentation for that.
Home Assistant Integration
Sweet, thank you!
Anyone looking to set this up should note that the instructions are slightly incorrect, the URL when adding the repository must be updated to the new repository location, there’s a PR for the change.
Additionally, I’ll mention that it just didn’t work for me, whereas owntracks worked flawlessly. The errors it provided were of little help, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t working. I’m planning to continue using owntracks for now.
Hi, this looks awesome. I just got it set up, and it’s working great, however I cannot get the Immich integration to work. Here’s the error I get when I paste in the domain and the freshly created API key. I’ve tried the API key with all permissions as well as with only the required permissions.
Connection failed: I/O error on POST request for “https://my.immich.domain/api/auth/validateToken”: my.immich.domainAny ideas of troubleshooting steps I could try? Thanks for sharing such a cool tool.
Cool, thank you.
Is this url resolvable from the reitti container? That one, needs to access immich.
So you built your own location tracking service for privacy, and then you post your tracking online? ;)
Seriously though, well done, quite impressive!
This looks very interesting.
I track the family’s location with GPS Logger (on Android) and the Home Assistant app on the iPhone user… it’s all going to HA at the moment to turn lights on when people get home…
And I have a separate Immich server.
So, reading this, I can combine this all together from HA and Immich - or do I need to send the GPS coordinates to this server too?
I’m also not a container user… skimming the installation section, the instructions appear to be only support docker - are standalone instructions also covered? (I may have missed them…)
But, this looks really nice.
I liked thr piechart where you distinguish between walking, cycling, driving, etc, I presume that’s done by velocity…? So, do you calculate that or need that data from the phone app?
Yes they all can work together. The data in home assistant should be enough.
Regardind docker or not. There is more instructions in the documentation how to build it from source. You can also run it from the jar. I need to check if this documented right now.
Yes, I try to make as most sense out of the data as possible. It is kind of a velocity matching. There is a settings menu where you can specify the speeds. Actual detecting them is a little bit more complicated since traffic lights etc need to be accounted for. If reitti detects something wrong, you can edit it directly on the timeline and set another transportation mode.
what’s the difference to traccar? just curious why this was built instead of you using traccar? I’m assuming there were missing features in traccar.
Looks good.
Is there any way to list and inspect individual tracks/trails, or is reitti meant for something else?
Not on a daily basis or in live. The main focus is in visit detection as best as we can, trips, tracks or trails are all the points between them.
Reitti is mainly developed to bring me easier to my memories. For that Places and Photos helped the most. To list individual tracks there is probably something better suited. But I would be happy to hear your usecase, maybe we can incorporate that into reitti.
Thanks for the response.
I focus more on each trip and like to examine location data not by time, but but by excursion. I use another self-hosted service that does this well, but going back manually to find photos to attach to each trip is somewhat tedious.
This function is what interested me in reitti; I thought I could set up immich integration an pull in photos from the time frame of each hike, flight, drive or ride.
But this seems like a fundamentally different approach to GPS documentation, so I don’t think there is room for a shift of this magnitude in reitti.
Ah, thank you for clarifying this. It sounds like AdventurerLog would be a better fit at the moment.
I envision the memories feature could also serve this purpose, generating a travel log from GPS data and pulling in all relevant images from Immich within that timeframe. Currently, it only allows for selecting a start and end date (as it was designed for longer vacations), but there’s no technical limitation preventing time-based selection.
The existing text templates, also geared towards vacations, would likely require some adjustments. One idea I’m exploring is integrating a small LLM to generate more natural and varied text.
If we develop this idea further, I believe reitti could certainly be adapted to your use case.
This piece of software was exactly what was missing for me after leaving the iOS ecosystem. This is great!
Thank you. Give it a try and I would love to hear your thoughts
I’ve been using Reitti for a few months now and love it! Thank you for this wonderful application!
Thank you very much for your comment. It means alot to me to hear that reitti is grown to an app others enjoy using :)
I’ve been following this since release and can only say a big thank you for how active you’ve been on this project! It’s great to see a developer take an active part in feedback and ideas and quickly being able to get them into the project. Keep going strong, and thank you!
Thank you so much for your kind word! This means alot for me.