OpenDroneLog: A Self Hosted DJI Flight Log Dashboard

If you have flown DJI drones for any length of time, you already know the feeling: your flight history is technically “there,” but not really usable. Logs live in different folders, different formats, different apps, and the moment you want to answer a simple question like “Which battery is aging fastest?” or “How high was that windy-lake flight last October?” you end up digging through exports, screenshots, and half-remembered filenames.

OpenDroneLog is built for that exact mess. It is a high-performance flight log analyzer and dashboard that lets you organize and study DJI flight logs plus Litchi CSV exports in one private place. It is available as a Tauri v2 desktop app and also as a Docker-deployable web app, with DuckDB and React doing the heavy lifting under the hood.

What is OpenDroneLog

At its core, OpenDroneLog is a “bring your own logs” dashboard. You import DJI logs (including .txt flight logs) and Litchi CSV exports, and it builds a local database so you can browse flights, filter them, replay them on a map, and dig into telemetry without shipping your data to somebody else’s cloud. The project calls this “local-first storage,” with all data kept in a local DuckDB database and no cloud upload required for normal use.

The problem it solves

OpenDroneLog turns raw flight records into something you can actually learn from:

Interactive flight maps with terrain, satellite toggles, and replay controls (including telemetry overlays).
Telemetry charts for speed, height, battery health, cell voltages, GPS, distance-to-home, and more, with zoomable timelines.
Smart deduplication so repeated imports do not balloon your library, using identifiers like drone serial, battery serial, and start time.
Practical “fleet management” features like per-battery health tracking and maintenance tracking with thresholds.
Exports in common formats (CSV, JSON, GPX, KML), plus shareable report outputs like a printable HTML flight report.

The result is less “I have logs” and more “I can answer questions about my flying.”

How it can be self-hosted

OpenDroneLog’s self-hosted mode is a real web deployment, not a flimsy demo. The Docker version uses an Axum REST backend, with Nginx serving the frontend and proxying API requests.

Get started with Docker Compose:

services:
  open-dronelog:
    image: ghcr.io/arpanghosh8453/open-dronelog:latest
    container_name: open-dronelog
    hostname: open-dronelog
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - drone-data:/data/drone-logbook

      # Uncomment and set your sync folder path to enable automatic log import
      # - /path/to/your/drone/logs/on/host/device:/sync-logs:ro

      # Uncomment to persist uploaded files to a host folder
      # - /path/to/uploaded/files:/data/drone-logbook/uploaded

    environment:
      - DATA_DIR=/data/drone-logbook
      - RUST_LOG=info
      - KEEP_UPLOADED_FILES=true

      # Uncomment to enable automatic sync from mounted folder
      # - SYNC_LOGS_PATH=/sync-logs

      # Uncomment to enable scheduled sync (cron expression, default: every 8 hours)
      # - SYNC_INTERVAL=0 0 */8 * * *

    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  drone-data:

The quick-start path is straightforward: run the container, map a port, and mount a persistent volume so your DuckDB database survives upgrades and restarts. The project documents a named volume mapped to an internal data directory, and it explicitly notes that your data persists unless you delete the volume.

If you want the “drop logs into a folder and let it ingest automatically” workflow, the Docker setup supports mounting a read-only sync folder and enabling scheduled sync with a cron expression via environment variables like SYNC_LOGS_PATH and SYNC_INTERVAL.

A small, important footnote

OpenDroneLog is licensed under AGPL-3.0, which matters if you modify and run it as a network service. Also, the README includes guidance for generating your own DJI Developer API key if you prefer not to rely on a bundled key.

If you have ever wanted a private, searchable “flight brain” you can run on your own machine, this project is aiming directly at that need, with enough polish that it feels like a tool you can actually live in, not just test once and forget.