Running Traccar on shared cPanel server

Published on Oct 22 2016 in Java Tomcat

Traccar can run on shared server (cPanel) standalone or in pair with OpenGTS. You need a few modifications to have it running.

Download and unpack the software. When trying to start installer on a server without root access we will get Permission denied'

wget https://github.com/tananaev/traccar/releases/download/v3.3/traccar-linux-64-3.3.zip
unzip traccar-linux-64-3.3.zip
bash traccar.run
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing traccar  100%
traccar.run: line 488: ./setup.sh: Permission denied

On shared server you will not be able to extraxt traccar to hardcoded /opt/traccar. You will need to modify the destination path and also the default HTTP port.

./traccar.run --keep --noexec --target traccar
Creating directory traccar
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing traccar  100%

Optionally modify UNIX_PATH in setup.sh to use traccar directory in your home directory (this step is not really needed as setup.sh only tries to make traccar autostarting on server boot).

sed -i 's/UNIX_PATH="\/opt/UNIX_PATH="~/' ~/traccar/setup.sh

Update paths to your own home directory in XML config file:

sed -i "s#\/opt\/traccar#$HOME\/traccar#g" ~/traccar/conf/traccar.xml

Update HTTP port to a custom one assigned by your hosting provider (11111 in this example):

sed -i 's/>8082</>11111</' ~/traccar/conf/traccar.xml

Modify bin/traccar by adding return 0; under mustBeRootOrExit() { and installdaemon() {

sed -i -e '/mustBeRootOrExit() {/a return 0;' -e '/installdaemon() {/a return 0;' ~/traccar/bin/traccar

This way you skip installation of startup script in its default location that is impossible on shared server anyway.

You can now start traccar with:

cd ~/traccar/bin/
./traccar start
Starting traccar...
Waiting for traccar......
running: PID:632085

Notes:

Make sure JDK version is set to 1.7 or higher. Otherwise you may get WrapperSimpleApp Error: Class org.traccar.Main found but could not be initialized: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/traccar/Main : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
Traccar wrapper spawns another JVM so make sure to have permission to run 2 JVMs at a time if you run an JVM-based application server in parallel.
Traccar will start with 128MB of JVM heap (actually using a 30MB idle and freshly started). If you ever need more then enabling PASS_THRU variable passes arguments starting from the second on to the JVM. You can then pass -Xmx256 for example.
You may get: WrapperSimpleApp Error: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread. Make sure number of processes (threads) for your account is more than 200 especially when running under CloudLinux and alongside another JVM.

References:

https://www.traccar.org/devices/ https://www.traccar.org/opengts/ https://github.com/tananaev/traccar/issues/1389

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