I have been travelling back and forth quite a bit recently to different locations and the family likes to see where I am and of course whether I am close by yet.

Since I left the Google ecosystem quite a few years ago I now faced a small challenge, how to share my location with my wife and children? I have no Google Maps installed on my phone, WhatsApp is too closely connected to Facebook for my taste and so far other apps I have seen enjoy keeping my movement history  a bit too much for comfort. Yet I still wanted to share my location, including updates of my (real time) movements.

Luckily there is a wonderful open source tool for that: Hauk. With a simple lightweight server install and a simple app on the phone I now can share my real time location and moving speed (that will be fun in a train to Paris at some point) showing on my own server with an OpenStreetMap based map.  Works miracles! Long live Open Source!

Yes, it is a bit of a hassle having to run your own server somewhere. However it is worth it! And… if you really want to, you can share your Hauk server of course. It is password protected, so all you need is to give someone the URL and a password.