Rastro

Rastro tracks Meshtastic radios (boats, vehicles, people) over a LoRa mesh and shows them on a self-hosted map, with no dependency on public Meshtastic servers or third-party maps.

[Meshtastic trackers] --LoRa--> [routers] --> [gateway node]
                                                  | USB
                                                  v
                                  rastro-gateway (host, systemd)
                                  filter -> disk spool -> MQTT (QoS 1, TLS)
                                                  |
                                                  v
          rastro-broker (Mosquitto, TLS only) -> rastro-ingest -> PostgreSQL
                                                                     |
                           browser <- rastro-web (viewer + /api proxy) <- rastro-api (read-only)

• Gateway (services/rastro_gateway/bridge): reads decoded packets from a Meshtastic node over USB, keeps only position and telemetry, writes each record to a disk spool before publishing, and replays the spool after an outage.
• Broker (Mosquitto): TLS on 8883 only, password + ACL per user (gateway publishes, ingest subscribes).
• Ingest (services/rastro_gateway/ingest): subscribes with a persistent session and acknowledges each message only after the database commit, so nothing is lost between broker and database. Replays are deduplicated by the database.
• API (services/rastro_api): FastAPI, read-only role, token or session-cookie auth, GeoJSON responses.
• Viewer (web/): SolidJS + MapLibre, offline basemap from a PMTiles file served next to the app.

Position tracks can be sensitive. Rastro keeps them on infrastructure you control: nothing is sent to public maps or third-party services.

Deployment options

• Single host with Docker Compose — deploy/docker-compose.yml; everything bound to loopback. See docs/DESENVOLVIMENTO.md.
• CapRover — one-click app rastro in the digidem store (digidem/caprover-one-click-apps), using an existing PostgreSQL; the only required field is the Postgres admin password (all other passwords and the broker TLS certificate are generated automatically; a temporary <app>-setup app prepares the database). See docs/OPERACAO-caprover.md.

The gateway always runs on the machine that has the Meshtastic node plugged in (a Raspberry Pi at the base station, for example) and connects to the broker over TLS. Radio provisioning (name, role, position interval, channel) is done on the bench over USB: docs/PROVISAO-noes.md.

Development

Requirements: Python 3.11+, Node 20+ with pnpm 9, Docker (for PostgreSQL in tests).

# gateway + ingest
cd services/rastro_gateway && pip install -e . pytest && pytest -q
# API (needs a PostgreSQL; see docs/DESENVOLVIMENTO.md)
cd services/rastro_api && pip install -e ".[dev]" && pytest -q
# viewer
cd web && pnpm install --frozen-lockfile && pnpm test && pnpm build

Operator-facing strings and operations docs are in Portuguese; code identifiers are in English.

License

GPL-3.0-only. The viewer is derived from meshtastic/map (GPL-3.0); see web/NOTICE.