An initiative to create an open source parcel tracking API and library that only uses public resources, no private access tokens or special contracts required.

Given the fact that this project was built from the ground up using modern tools in order to take advantage of newer features and a better development experience the minimum requirements for running the project may be a bit high.

• Python 3.11 or newer
• SQLite 3.38.0 or newer

First let's set up the environment in order to run our server. Start by creating a Python virtual environment and installing the project's dependencies into it:

python -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip install -r requirements.txt

Next we need to create a configuration file. This can be done by duplicating the example config/config.example.yml into config/config.yml and generating an appropriate encryption key for the session cookie storage:

cp config/config.example.yml config/config.yml sed -i '' -r "s/SECRET_KEY.+/SECRET_KEY: '$(python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex())')'/" config/config.yml cat config/config.yml

Ensure that the SECRET_KEY value was properly set to a strong encryption key. Then to the initialization of the database using the sql/initialize.sql. This can be achieved using the following command:

sqlite3 openparcel.db < sql/initialize.sql

Now all that's left for you to do is start the server up and test it out!

flask run

This library and service is free and its source is available under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1, allowing personal use that respects your privacy (self hosting) while ensuring it is not exploited by comercial entities.