Argus

OVERVIEW

Argus is an open-source intelligence and situational awareness platform. It collects, normalizes, and plots dozens of public data sources onto a single interactive map — aircraft, vessels, satellites, earthquakes, fires, air quality, weather alerts, power plants, submarine cables and internet outages among them — and it runs entirely on the operator’s own infrastructure, with no central service in the middle.

THE PROBLEM

The data is public, but it is scattered across dozens of APIs that speak different formats, and most tools that unify it are hosted services: you send them your queries, and you stop being able to run the thing on your own terms.

APPROACH

The system is split into four parts — a FastAPI backend that collects and normalizes the feeds, a Next.js dashboard drawing the map with MapLibre GL, a Tauri desktop shell, and the mesh services. Everything is configured through environment variables and no API key is required to start, so a first run works before the operator has signed up for anything. It ships as Docker images and is licensed AGPL-3.0, which keeps network-hosted forks open too.

FEATURES

• Independent map layers for aircraft, vessels, satellites, orbital imagery, and infrastructure
• SIGINT sources: KiwiSDR, PSK Reporter, SatNOGS, TinyGS, Meshtastic, and APRS
• OSINT aggregation of regional news through GDELT and public Telegram channels
• Infonet — a peer-to-peer layer that syncs events between nodes with end-to-end encryption
• Ground change detection from SAR radar imagery
• Official Docker images and signature-verified desktop updates

STACK

Python / FastAPI / Next.js / React / MapLibre GL / Tauri / Rust / Docker