tak-feeder-gdacs

Feed current GDACS disaster data into your TAK server

(C) 2023 Stefan Gofferje

Licensed under the GNU General Public License V3 or later.

Description

What is GDACS?

GDACS or Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (https://www.gdacs.org) is a cooperation framework between the United Nations and the European Commission. It includes disaster managers and disaster information systems worldwide and aims at filling the information and coordination gaps in the first phase after major disasters.

GDACS provides real-time access to web‐based disaster information systems and related coordination tools. A more detailed description of GDACS purpose, content and guidelines, agreed and approved by the steering committee can be found here.

TAK server feeder

This feeder pulls the RSS feeds from GDACS, converts the current events to CoT messages and sends them to a TAK server. ATAK, WinTAK and WebTAK will show the events with icons corresponding to the type of event and the severity (WinTAK doesn't show the color, though).

Please note that neither the author nor this software project are in any way affiliated with GDACS.

Configuration

The following values are supported and can be provided either as environment variables or through an .env-file.

Variable	Default	Purpose
REMOTE_SERVER_URL	empty	(mandatory) TAK server full URL, e.g. ssl://takserver:8089
REMOTE_SSL_USER_CERTIFICATE	empty	(mandatory for ssl) User certificate in PEM format
REMOTE_SSL_USER_KEY	empty	(mandatory for ssl) User certificate key file (xxx.key)
GDACS_PULL_INTERVAL	60	(optional) Update intervall in seconds
LOGCOT	false	(optional) Log created CoTs to the console
UUID	empty	(optional) Set feeder UID - if not set, the feeder will create one

Note: At the moment, only SSL TCP connections are supported.

Certificates

These are the server-issued certificate and key files. Before using, the password needs to be removed from the key file with openssl rsa -in cert.key -out cert-nopw.key. OpenSSL will ask for the key password which usually is "atakatak".

Container use

First, get your certificate and key and copy them to a suitable folder which needs to be added as a volume to the container.

Image

The image is built for AMD64 and ARM64 and pushed to ghcr.io: ghcr.io/sgofferj/tak-feeder-gdacs:latest

Docker

First, rename .env.example to .env and edit according to your needs
Create and start the container:

docker run -d --env-file .env -v <path-to-certificate-directory>:/certs:ro --name tak-feeder-gdacs --restart always ghcr.io/sgofferj/tak-feeder-gdacs:latest

Docker compose

Here is an example for a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '2.0'

services:
  gdacs:
    image: ghcr.io/sgofferj/tak-feeder-gdacs:latest
    restart: always
    networks:
      - default
    volumes:
      - <path to certificate-directory>:/certs:ro
    environment:
      - REMOTE_SERVER_URL=ssl://tak-server:8089
      - REMOTE_SSL_USER_CERTIFICATE=cert.pem
      - REMOTE_SSL_USER_KEY=key.pem
      - GDACS_PULL_INTERVAL=60
      - LOGCOT=false

networks:
  default:

The following example is for using the container with compose on the same machine as the TAK server. Submitted by atakhq.

version: '2.0'

services:
  gdacs:
    image: ghcr.io/sgofferj/tak-feeder-gdacs:latest
    restart: always
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - ~/tak-server/certs:/certs:ro
    environment:
      - REMOTE_SERVER_URL=ssl://127.0.0.1:8089
      - REMOTE_SSL_USER_CERTIFICATE=/certs/gdacs.pem
      - REMOTE_SSL_USER_KEY=/certs/gdacs-nopw.key
      - GDACS_PULL_INTERVAL=60
      - LOGCOT=false