Description
Boat Position turns your WordPress site into a live tracking and logbook service for your boat.
The plugin is designed around the Teltonika RUTX50 router (*), a compact Linux-based 5G router with built-in GPS.
A shell script on the router sends a position to your site every minute. The plugin stores each position, runs a state machine to group positions into trips and legs, and serves two public pages:
- Live map (
/boat-position/map) — shows the current position on an OpenStreetMap/OpenSeaMap map with a rotating arrow icon when underway and an idle indicator when stopped. - Logbook (
/boat-position/history) — calendar sidebar with trip history. Click any day to see the full route on the map. Logged-in editors can label harbour names and merge incorrectly split trips.
Over 150 Danish harbours are included as seed data so harbour names are detected automatically from GPS coordinates.
No third-party services or API keys are required beyond your own WordPress site. Maps are rendered using the free Leaflet.js library with OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap tiles.
(*) There are other alternatives to using the RTUTX50 router, any device that has access to a GPS and the internet can be configured as the source of position data.
E.g. a linux machine like Rasberry PI connected to either its own GPS or the boat NMEA data.
Screenshots
Live map — current boat position with directional arrow on OpenSeaMap. 
Logbook — calendar sidebar, trip list, and route drawn on the map.
Installation
- Upload the
boat-positiondirectory to/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate the plugin in Plugins in the WordPress admin.
- Go to Settings Boat Position to set a secret API key and find the router configuration instructions.
- Follow the router setup guide in Plugins Boat Position About to configure your router’s
sendgps.shscript and cron job. - Send a test position from a command prompt to verify the endpoint is working before installing on the boat.
After activation, if /boat-position/map returns a 404, go to Settings Permalinks and click Save Changes to flush the rewrite rules.
FAQ
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How do I use this plugin?
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Install and activate the plugin, then go to Settings Boat Position. Set a secret API key, then follow the router configuration guide in the About page to set up your router’s cron job.
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Does it only work with the RUTX50 router?
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No. Any device that can send an HTTP POST request with
lat,lon,speed,course, andgps_timefields to the REST endpoint will work. The About page documents the exact format. -
Where are the public pages?
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The plugin registers two pages automatically — no WordPress pages or shortcodes are needed:
- Live map:
https://yoursite.com/boat-position/map - Logbook:
https://yoursite.com/boat-position/history
- Live map:
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Can I avoid storing the secret key in the database?
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Yes. Define the key as a constant in
wp-config.php:define( ‘PCIO_BOAT_POSITION_API_KEY’, ‘your-secret-key-here’ );
When this constant is present, the database option is ignored and the settings field is shown as read-only.
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The logbook is empty — no trips appear.
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Check that the router is sending data by looking at your database’s
wp_boat_positionstable. If rows are present but no trips appear, the trip engine may not have processed them yet — visit the ingest endpoint directly or check the About page for the manual trigger curl command.
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Contributors & Developers
“Boat Position” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0
- Initial release.