Introduction

Flightlog was born from my nerdy need for a bookkeeping tool to track all the flights I have taken so far.

For years, I was quite happy with flugstatistik.de, but unfortunately, it hasn't evolved much over the past few years, resulting in a UI that looks quite outdated and a feature set that is okay-ish, but lacking some elements I would like to see. Additionally, there was (and still is!) no way to back up the data stored there, which leads to considerable vendor lock-in. What happens if they decide to stop providing their service, or if I simply forget my login credentials? No, that's just not acceptable.

From what I observed at the time (and still see today), there are no real alternatives. Openflights.org is an excellent idea, but the UI is even worse than flugstatistik.de's, looking as though it was thrown together in an hour or two. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure a significant amount of time has been invested, but to me, it just looks terrible.

Therefore, with no suitable tool available, I decided to create one myself. The overall UI somewhat incorporates ideas from flugstatistik.de but is a bit more modern and streamlined.

Installation

Docker container

The easiest way to start a flightlog application is by starting a Docker container which can be easily fetched from DockerHub (new releases are automatically pushed to Docker Hub so all you need to do is to start a Docker container).

$ docker run -p 8080:8080 perdian/flightlog:latest

Replace latest version with the latest release which can be found at https://github.com/perdian/flightlog/releases.

The application will be available on the machine on which you're executing the container at:

http://localhost:8080/flightlog/

An embedded H2 database file will be used, mounted as volume for the created container. It can be configured using environment variables (see the Configuration section for details).

To persist the database you have to mount the directory /var/flightlog/database/ from the Docker container to somewhere on your host machine:

$ docker run -v /path/to/your/host/directory:/var/flightlog/database -p 8080:8080 perdian/flightlog

Configuration

The complete configuration can be done through environment variables so whether you're launching the application as a Docker container or through any other method the same set of environment variables can be used.

Database

By default an embedded H2 database is used but any database supported by Hibernate can be configured. The JDBC drivers for PostgreSQL and MySQL are already bundled within the standard Spring Boot application and Docker image.

Environment variable	Default value	Comment
FLIGHTLOG_DB_URL	jdbc:h2:${FLIGHTLOG_DB_DIRECTORY:~/.flightlog/}/flightlogdb	The complete JDBC URL of the database
FLIGHTLOG_DB_DRIVER_CLASS_NAME	org.h2.Driver	The JDBC driver class name. The class must be accessible on the classpath.
FLIGHTLOG_DB_USERNAME	sa	The JDBC username
FLIGHTLOG_DB_PASSWORD		The JDBC password
FLIGHTLOG_DB_DIRECTORY	~/.flightlog/ for the JAR distribution, /var/flightlog/database/ for the Docker distribution	The directory where the embedded H2 database is located. Will only be used if FLIGHTLOG_DB_URL is not overwritten.

Authentication

The application ships with a few options of authentication providers readily available.

By default no authentication is required, which means without any additional configuration the application works in a single user mode: All flights are implicitly linked to a single user named example@example.com. The user won't have to authenticate but will automatically be authenticated with every request.

The email of the user can be changed by setting the environment variable FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_FIXED_DEFAULT_EMAIL_ADDRESS.

OAuth2 authentication

Flightlog supports OAuth2 authentication via any OAuth2 authentication providers. To enable an OAuth2 authentication provider you have to set the FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_TYPE environment variable to OAUTH2.

For each login the application will perform an OAuth2 authentication. After the successful authentication an entry within the flightuser_user database table will be made, populated with the values retrieved from the OAuth2 provider.

Google

To enable the OAuth authentication you have to set the FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_TYPE environment variable to oauth2

The following environment variables have to be set to the OAuth2 credentials retrieved from the Google Cloud console:

• FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID
• FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET

The redirect URL <APPLICATION_ROOT>/login/oauth2/code/flightlog must be entered in the Google Cloud console for your Google application.

For example if you run Flightlog directly from the Docker container on localhost via http://localhost:8080/flightlog/ then the redirect URL that needs to be configured at Google is http://localhost:8080/flightlog//login/oauth2/code/flightlog.

Generic OAuth2 authentication provider

Any other OAuth2 authentication provider can be configured in a similar manner to Google but with a few more environment variables required.

The examples listed below are taken from an Authentik installation run directly from a Docker container:

Environment variable	Required	Default value	Example
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_CLIENT_ID	Yes		abc123
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_CLIENT_SECRET	Yes		xyz987
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_CLIENT_NAME	No	flightlog
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_AUTHORIZATION_URI	Yes		http://localhost:9000/application/o/authorize/
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_TOKEN_URI	Yes		http://localhost:9000/application/o/token/
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_USER_INFO_URI	Yes		http://localhost:9000/application/o/userinfo/
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_USER_NAME_ATTRIBUTE	No	name
FLIGHTLOG_AUTHENTICATION_OAUTH2_JWK_SET_URI	Yes		http://localhost:9000/application/o/flightlog/jwks/

Whitelisting users

By default no new users can register themselves in a Flightlog application.

This is a conscious choice to prohibit someone spamming the system and creating entries in the database by simply performing multiple OAuth2 authentications.

There are two ways to allow an authentication from a new OAuth2 account:

Disabling registration blocker

Setting the environment variable FLIGHTLOG_REGISTRATION_ALLOW_BY_DEFAULT to true will bypass the check for existence and will create a new entry in the local database for every new account authenticated via the currently configured OAuth2 authentication provider.

Adding the email address to the allowlist

When a new OAuth2 account is found the system will check the internal allowlist whether the email address of the new user is found on the allowlist. If that's the case then the new user will be added into the database and the authentication will succeed.

To place one or more user(s) on the allowlist add the email addresses to the environment variable FLIGHTLOG_REGISTRATION_EMAIL_ADDRESSES_ALLOWLIST (separate multiple addresses by commata).

Other environment variables

Environment variable	Default value	Comment
FLIGHTLOG_SERVER_PORT	8080	The port on which the application will listen for incoming requests
FLIGHTLOG_SERVER_CONTEXT_PATH	/flighlog	The context path under which the application will be made available. The default value /flightlog implies that when using the default port of 8080 the applications main page can be reached at http://localhost:8080/flightlog.
FLIGHTLOG_SERVER_COOKIE_NAME	flightlog-session	The name of the cookie that is used to store session related data.

Build

Flightlog is a Spring Boot application and can be built and executed accordingly:

$ git clone https://github.com/perdian/flightlog.git
$ cd flightlog
$ mvn clean package

This creates the application JAR file into target/flightlog.jar

Run

JAR

The JAR file already contains everything needed to start Flighlog with its default settings:

$ mvn clean package
$ java -jar target/flightlog.jar

The application will now start and is accessible at

http://localhost:8080/flightlog/

An embedded H2 database file will be stored at ~/.flightlog/. Both the database location as well as the database type can be configured using environment variables (see the Configuration section for details).

Build from sources

If you want to build the Docker image yourself from the sources it can be done like this:

$ mvn clean package
$ docker build -t perdian/flightlog .

After the container is built you can verify the application by running it:

$ docker run -p 8080:8080 perdian/flightlog

The application will be available on the machine on which you're executing the container at:

http://localhost:8080/flightlog/

Credits

This application would not be possible without the great work of other open source projects.

A big thank you therefore goes to:

• Openflights.org for its collection of airport and airline data as well as inspiration of how to display the flights on the map (https://openflights.org/data.html).
• Openlayers for the ground work in providing the world map (https://openlayers.org/).
• arc.js for handling the pain of computing a great circle between two airports (https://github.com/springmeyer/arc.js/).
• Semantic UI for its beautiful frontend components (https://semantic-ui.com/).
• JQuery for the ultimate DOM manipulation tool (https://jquery.com/).
• Spring Boot for the heavy lifting in the backend (https://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/).
• Hibernate for the SQL abstraction layer (http://hibernate.org/).

License

Flightlog is licensed under the Apache Licence 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/).