✈️ Building a Real-Time Aircraft Tracker in My Homelab

Turning a Raspberry Pi and some containers into a live aviation dashboard

🧠 Introduction

One of the things I enjoy most about running a homelab is taking random pieces of technology and turning them into something genuinely useful (or at least really cool).

Recently, I set out to build a system that could answer a simple question:

“What aircraft is closest to my house right now?”

That question turned into a full-blown project involving:

Building Single Sign-On for My Homelab with Authentik and Grafana

Introduction

Like many people running a homelab, I found myself with a growing collection of self-hosted services—Grafana for monitoring, Uptime Kuma for alerts, Portainer for container management, and more.

Each service worked well on its own, but there was one problem:
every service had its own login.

It wasn’t just inconvenient—it also didn’t scale. Managing users, credentials, and access across multiple applications quickly becomes messy.