Geoclue: The Geoinformation Service

Geoclue is a D-Bus geoinformation service. The goal of the Geoclue project is to make creating location-aware applications as simple as possible.

Geoclue is Free Software, licensed under GNU GPLv2+.

Geoclue comprises the following functionalities :

• WiFi-based geolocation (accuracy: in meters)
• GPS(A) receivers (accuracy: in centimeters)
• GPS of other devices on the local network, e.g smartphones (accuracy: in centimeters)
• 3G modems (accuracy: in kilometers, unless modem has GPS)
• Static location source (reads location from a system-wide file)

WiFi and cell tower-based geolocation used to use Mozilla Location Service, which closed on June 12th, 2024. Geoclue currently does not enable WiFi location by default. Some potential replacements for MLS are:

• Positon. Free-of-charge, network-based location service for the open-source software community. Uses data from a commercial location service, requires API keys.
• BeaconDB. Public domain wireless geolocation database. Crowd-sourced WiFi, Bluetooth and cell tower database.
• OLS. Offline Location Service. Local-data on-device server, mostly useful for devices with GPS.

For using phone GPS, you can install the latest version of GeoclueShare app on your phone (currently, this is supported only on Android devices).

Geoclue was also used for (reverse-)geocoding but that functionality has been dropped in favour of the geocode-glib library.

History

Geoclue was started during the GNOME Summit 2006 in Boston. At least Keith Preston and Tuomas Kuosmanen can be blamed. There was a total rewrite after version 0.9.

There was yet another rewrite that we call geoclue2. The first version to introduce the re-write was version 1.99.

Communication and Contribution

• Discussions take place on the GNOME Discourse.
• The IRC chat for geoclue is on #gnome-maps at irc.gimp.org .
• Issues are tracked on Gitlab.

Get Source Code

The source code is available as a tar-ball and in a Git repository.

For latest release tarballs, use the Download option of Gitlab on the tag of your choice.

Older (than 2.4.13) releases are available here.

Git repository for Geoclue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/geoclue/geoclue

Building Geoclue

The guidelines for building geoclue have been documented here.

Using Geoclue in an application

• D-Bus API: The documentation for using geoclue with D-Bus API is here.
• Libgeoclue API documentation: The documentation is available here.
• C user application: Here is an example showing a C application that uses geoclue to locate its user.