Nautilus Tracker - Backend

The Nautilus Tracker Backend API is a server-side solution designed to provide easy access to GPS tracking data stored in a MySQL database. Built using PHP, this API offers two primary endpoints that allow clients to retrieve and interact with GPS data based on specific parData Retrieval by Date Rangeameters.

Features:

• Data Retrieval by Date Range: The first endpoint allows users to retrieve GPS data within a specified date range. Clients can pass start and end dates as query parameters, and the server will query the MySQL database to fetch the relevant data. The data is returned in a structured format, consisting of GeoJSON objects, with each object containing a year property and coordinates represented in a LineString geometry. This makes it ideal for visualizing GPS tracking data on a map, showing movement over time.

Example response:

[
    {
        "type": "Feature",
        "properties": {
            "year": 2023
        },
        "geometry": {
            "coordinates": [[-122.4194, 37.7749], [-122.4194, 37.7750]],
            "type": "LineString"
        }
    }
]

• Available Years Endpoint: The second endpoint returns a list of all years that are represented in the database. This allows clients to dynamically filter and choose the specific time period they wish to query. The server retrieves this information by querying the year column in the database and returning a unique list of years.

Installation:

Follow these steps to set up and run the Nautilus Tracker app on your local machine.

Prerequisites:

• PHP 8 or higher
• Composer 2.8 or higher
• Docker 28 or higher

Set Up Environment Variables

Configuration & Deployment

The .env file is generated automatically by the GitHub Actions deployment workflow on every push to master. It is not committed to the repository — the local .env is a sample only.

The workflow reads the following GitHub Actions secrets (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions) and writes them into a fresh .env before uploading to the remote server via FTP:

Secret name	.env key written	Purpose
DB_HOST	DB_HOST	Database server IP / hostname
DB_USERNAME	DB_USERNAME	Database username
DB_PASSWORD	DB_PASSWORD	Database password
DB_NAME	DB_NAME	Database name
DB_TABLE	DB_TABLE	Table name
API_KEY	API_KEY	API authentication key
FTP_SERVER_DEV	(FTP host)	Remote server for deployment
FTP_USER	(FTP user)	FTP username
FTP_PASSWORD	(FTP password)	FTP password
FTP_FOLDER	(FTP remote path)	Remote directory to deploy into

Important: any manual edits to the .env file on the remote server will be overwritten on the next push to master. To make a permanent change to credentials or config, update the corresponding GitHub secret and push to trigger a new deployment.

CSV input format

CSV file rows must contain the first three fields formatted in the following way: DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS, latitude, longitude 01/09/2023 00:35:55,52.66646,-2.4749416, [ ... ]