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I spent four hours this weekend migrating my decade of location history off Google. Dawarich 1.11.0 just dropped, and honestly, it’s the closest thing to a perfect “Google Maps Timeline” replacement the selfhosted community has right now.

It’s a beast. A slightly bloated, incredibly ambitious beast.

The Takeout Headache Is Finally Dead #

If you’ve ever tried to import a Google Takeout location archive into self-hosted software, you know it’s an exercise in pure masochism. JSON parsing errors, timezone corruption, missing coordinates. Usually, I just give up and run an OwnTracks container that starts fresh.

Dawarich 1.11.0 fixes this.

Over on r/selfhosted, user u/track_my_life posted a massive thread detailing their swap to the new release. Their comment summed it up perfectly: “Finally processed a 2.3GB Takeout archive without crashing. Previous versions laughed at my RAM and died. 1.11.0 took about 45 minutes on a 4-core Hetzner VM.” That tracks with my experience. The new background processing queue handles massive datasets without choking the web UI to death.

Previously, trying to chew through five years of location pings would just nuke your database. The migration tools in 1.11.0 actually use a Redis-based Sidekiq queue to push the heavy lifting off the main thread. About damn time.

Postgres, Podman, and Prayers #

The elephant in the room is the database. Dawarich relies on Postgres and Redis. It is absolutely not a lightweight app. You can run it on a Rasp 4 if you want, but like u/track_my_life mentions, when the ingestion queue hits, Postgres will happily eat all 8GB of your RAM and ask for more just to index your weekend bar crawls.

If you’re running this on a $4 Hetzner CX22, you absolutely need to strictly limit your Docker RAM limits and run it behind a swap file. No shame in that.

I haven’t tested this on ARM yet, mostly because I value my weekends and the Ruby toolchain can be a nightmare to compile on a Pi. Your mileage may vary, but if you want a stable box, stick to x86 VPS nodes for this one.

The Great Container War: Docker vs Podman #

Because Dawarich’s docker-compose file is notoriously complex—seriously, it links a web app, a background worker, a Postgres db, and a Redis cache—the community decided to do what it does best: argue about container runtimes.

User u/podman_fanatic in the thread jumped in with their standard crusade: “Just use Podman rootless, stop running everything as root.”

Listen, I love Podman as much as the next paranoid sysadmin, but Dawarich has some deeply opinionated volume mounts. If you run it rootless out of the box, you are going to spend three hours fighting SELinux permissions on your CentOS box, and you will be furious.

I threw it on the exact same Docker setup I use for everything else on my DigitalOcean droplet, slapped a Caddy reverse proxy in front of it, and woke away. It took me 15 minutes. If you have a podman setup already humming, great. If you’re just trying to get your data off Google’s servers, stick to standard Docker and save yourself the debug cycle.

Is It Overkill? #

Let’s be real. Setting up Postgres, Redis, a web container, a worker container, Caddy, and writing about 40 lines of YAML just to map a road trip you took in 2018 is objectively overkill for most people.

If you just want to see your daily heatmap, grab the Overland app on iOS, point it at a simple PHP script on a $2 Linode, and call it a day.

But if you actually care about owning the past ten years of your location data, Dawarich 1.11.0 is the only game in town that actually works right now. The visualizations are slick, the stats page is scarily detailed, and it finally doesn’t crash when you look at it funny.