Traccar GPS Tracking on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
by cloudimg
Track vehicles and assets in real time, with a unique administrator created on first boot.
Traccar is the reference open source GPS tracking and fleet telematics server. It receives position reports from vehicle trackers, asset tags and phones, stores them with a complete history, and turns them into live maps, trip replay, geofences, scheduled and on-demand reports, event notifications, and driver and maintenance records. Traccar understands more than two hundred device protocols, so most tracking hardware on the market can report to it directly, and everything the web interface can do is also available through a full REST API.
What you get. Traccar 6.15.3 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, installed from the project's own pinned release archive and run by systemd as an unprivileged user on Ubuntu's own OpenJDK 21 package, so the Java runtime is patched by the operating system rather than vendored inside the application. PostgreSQL 16 holds devices, positions, users and reports on the loopback interface, and nginx serves the web interface over HTTPS.
A deliberate protocol set, not all two hundred. Three device-protocol listeners are enabled by default - the Traccar Client phone app, Teltonika hardware and the GT06 family - and every other protocol is disabled in the configuration rather than merely firewalled. The deployment guide shows exactly how to enable the protocol your own trackers speak and open the matching network security group rule.
No default login and no open enrolment. No administrator account and no database exist in the image. On each VM's first boot an empty database is created and migrated, the administrator is created with a password generated on that VM, self-registration is confirmed closed, and the credentials are written to a file only root can read. The web server stays shut until that finishes, so there is no window in which the instance is reachable with an uninitialised database - which on a tracking server would otherwise let the first visitor enrol themselves as an administrator.
Hardened by default. Only SSH, the two web ports and the three device ports are reachable from outside the VM, and port 80 issues a permanent redirect to HTTPS. The application and the database are never exposed directly. The reverse proxy overwrites the client address headers it forwards, so a caller cannot forge the address Traccar records against a sign-in, and it stamps Secure, HttpOnly and SameSite onto the session cookie. The server makes no outbound calls by default: the upstream usage-statistics upload and the geocoder are both switched off. An on-VM self-test proves the whole posture at any time.
Licensing and trademarks. Traccar is free software under the Apache License 2.0, with no subscription or licence key. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders; cloudimg is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Traccar or Traccar Ltd, and packages the unmodified open source software. The cloudimg charge of $0.04 per vCPU/hour covers packaging, hardening and 24/7 support.