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FOSS Public Alert Server

The FOSS Public Alert Server lets clients receive Push Notification via UnifiedPush about official emergency alerts worldwide. Besides infrastructure like sirens, radio, and Cell-Broadcast, CAP(Common Alerting Protocol) alerts are one way of alerting the public. CAP alerts are used for a wide variety of emergencies. From alerts about extreme weather to alerts about contaminated drinking water to Pandemics. Our server bundles over 280 official CAP alert publishers worldwide and can easily extend to more sources. When finished, this server can be used with clients like FOSS Warn and kPublicAlerts (still beta).

We have three main motivations. Firstly, we want to offer an easy-to-use alternative to propriety emergency apps to allow privacy- and freedom-focused people to receive emergency alerts. Secondly, we want to enable other developers to implement clients for different devices like desktop PCs, smart speakers, and Linux smartphones, and last but not least, we want to make traveling easier. While traveling, no one wants to search and install the local emergency app to receive emergency alerts in this country. With our solution, there is one app for the world.   This project aims to expand the existing and already used alerting infrastructure and is not a replacement for any part of it. Stay informed and safe!

a project in collaboration with KDE and the FOSS Warn Team

This project is still in development and not yet ready for production!

Funding

2024-10 until 2025-10

This project was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No. 101092990.

  

Server setup

The server consists of three parts:

  • An off-the-shelf PostGIS database server.
  • The AlertHandler, which retrieves the alert sources and stores the alerts in the database Stores alerts in the database and provides endpoints for retrieving alerts
  • the SubscriptionHandler, with which you can register for an area to receive push notifications
  • A celery worker who calls up the alert-fetching at regular intervals

PostGIS setup

No special configuration is required, but there needs to be an empty database and, depending on your setup, a corresponding database user.

Aggregator service setup

The aggregator service uses Django and needs a few other Python modules as dependencies as well, see publicAlertAggregator/requirements.txt. Install those via your distribution or pip (see also the pip user guide).

The aggregator service needs to be configured to find your PostGIS database. This can be done in publicAlertsAggregator/settings.py or via environment variables.

  • POSTGRES_HOST: IP address or host name of the PostGIS server
  • POSTGRES_DATABASE: name of the PostGIS database
  • POSTGRES_USER: name of the user on the PostGIS database
  • POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password for connecting to the PostGIS database

The aggregator service is started as follows for local development:

python3 manage.py collectstatic
python3 manage.py migrate
python3 manage.py runserver 8000

The first two steps are only necessary when the static files or the database layout changed respectively, you'll only need the last command otherwise.

For a production deployment, you'll likely want to put this behind a HTTP server, see the Django deployment documentation.

Celery setup

We use celery to dispatch tasks periodically in the background. Celery requires a message transport (broker). We have chosen rabbitmq.

pip install celery
pip install django-celery-beat

# start rabbitmq docker container
docker run -d -p 5672:5672 rabbitmq

# start celery 
celery -A foss_public_alert_server worker --loglevel=INFO

# start celery beat
celery -A foss_public_alert_server beat -l INFO --scheduler django_celery_beat.schedulers:DatabaseScheduler

check out the official manual