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Starting the Program

Once you have installed the program and created a base directory, you will learn how to start the program in this how-to.

On Linux, execute the following in the command line, where you need to replace YOUR_BASEDIR with the path to your base directory.

geo-activity-playground --basedir YOUR_BASEDIR serve

Should that fail with “command not found”, you need to add local bin to path.

The webserver will start up and give you a bit of output like this:

2026-04-11 20:34:09 geo_activity_playground.webui.app INFO Using database file at '/home/mu/nobackup/Testsuite/database.sqlite'.
2026-04-11 20:34:09 alembic.runtime.migration INFO Context impl SQLiteImpl.
2026-04-11 20:34:09 alembic.runtime.migration INFO Will assume non-transactional DDL.
Importing activity files: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 2/2 [00:00<00:00, 35.74it/s]
2026-04-11 20:34:09 geo_activity_playground.webui.app INFO Importer thread is done.
2026-04-11 20:34:09 geo_activity_playground.webui.app INFO Starting Waitress server at http://127.0.0.1:5000
2026-04-11 20:34:09 waitress INFO Serving on http://127.0.0.1:5000

The warning about the development server is fine. We are using this only to play around, not to power a web service for other users. There might be some more messages about downloading and parsing data. The first startup will take quite some time.

Open http://127.0.0.1:5000 to open the website in your browser and you will see the user interface.

Explorer video export

Go to Explorer and open a zoom level page. There is a Generate explorer MP4 form where you can configure width, height, FPS, interpolation, and fade and then start rendering.

You can also use the CLI:

geo-activity-playground --basedir YOUR_BASEDIR explorer-video --zoom 14 --video-width 1920 --video-height 1080 --fps 30 --download-workers 16

Setting host and port

In case you don't like the default value of 127.0.0.1:5000, you can use the optional command line arguments --host and --port to specify your values.

Optional: choosing the HTTP server

serve uses --http-server waitress by default, which is the recommended setting for normal use.

There is also --http-server werkzeug if you explicitly want the Werkzeug server (for example while debugging server behavior). Most users can safely ignore this option.