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Wintertrace
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Self-hosting & operations

Installation (technical reference)

A concise operator reference for installing Wintertrace on your own web hosting: the order of steps, the public-folder principle, the cron job, and what to do after first setup.

This page summarises the installation from an operator’s perspective and points to the more detailed material elsewhere. The illustrated step-by-step walkthrough with browser-assistant screenshots is on the Installation page — this reference focuses on the points that most often cause confusion in practice.

Technical prerequisites (PHP version, database, extensions, cron support) are listed under System requirements.

Order at a glance

  1. Download the signed ZIP package of the current release.
  2. Upload the contents via FTP to a subfolder on your web hosting (e.g. /wintertrace/).
  3. Set the domain’s document root to public/ (see the section below).
  4. Open the domain in a browser — the browser assistant prompts for database credentials and creates the first admin account. An empty database is sufficient; Wintertrace creates all tables itself.
  5. Set up the cron job (see the section after next).
  6. Add drivers and connect their GPS source — see OwnTracks / GPS source setup.

Why the document root must point to public/

Wintertrace follows the standard public-folder pattern of Laravel: only the public/ directory belongs in the publicly accessible area; the rest of the application code sits outside the web root.

Set your domain’s document root to …/wintertrace/public/, not to …/wintertrace/. Skipping this step exposes application code and configuration files to the public internet. If your hosting provider does not allow a subdirectory as the document root, move the contents of public/ into the target directory and adjust the paths in index.php accordingly.

The cron job

Wintertrace requires one cron job that runs every minute. The exact URL to call is shown by the assistant at the end of the installation; most hosting control panels provide a graphical cron editor where you can add the job. What this cron job handles during operation, and why no permanently running background process is required, is explained under Updates & cron in operation.

After installation

A brief checklist for the first few minutes:

  • Cron job created and running every minute (the dashboard shows the status)
  • At least one driver added and their OwnTracks connection verified
  • A test service job created and a PDF service record generated
  • The automatic update check enabled or disabled as preferred
  • The data-retention period set to the desired value

The integrated help inside the software provides additional guidance during setup — it is matched exactly to the installed version.