HamDB Refactor

Jon-K6NL

HamDB was originally written about 10 years ago using Apache, MySQL, and PHP to power both the website and the API. I always intended to open source it, but the codebase was rough and the deployment process… let’s just say not friendly.

As API usage has continued to grow, I decided it was time to take a serious look at optimization. After a decade, the project had become brittle and the technology stack was showing its age.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been rewriting HamDB in Python, using modern tools like FastAPI and Uvicorn. The result is a much faster, lighter-weight system designed from the ground up to be:

- Open source
- Self-hostable
- A drop-in replacement for the current API

Every API response, across all currently supported formats, will remain exactly the same, ensuring zero impact on existing applications.

The new version is also fully containerized and easy to deploy using Docker and Docker Compose.

The refactor isn’t quite finished yet. The Python API already works perfectly against the production database, but I’m still finalizing the ingestion pipelines for callsign data from various government organizations. Progress is going very well, and I’m aiming to have everything publicly available on GitHub by January 1st.

Josh

Really appreciate you keeping HamDB free and account-less while still putting real effort into modernizing it. That choice is a big reason it gets used in scripts, tools, and smaller projects without friction.

Your contribution to the ham radio world definitely does not go unnoticed. HamDB has quietly become one of those pieces of infrastructure a lot of us rely on without even thinking about it, which is usually a sign it is doing its job well. That kind of work deserves credit.

The forum makes sense too. With the Python API and self-hosting coming online, having a direct place to coordinate, share deployment details, and surface edge cases feels like the right move. Especially the stuff that never shows up cleanly in logs.

Looking forward to seeing what you ship.
KJ5IRQ

Jon-K6NL

Josh

Thanks for the kind words. When I originally built HamDB it was really for a personal project I had been working on. When I got it stood up, I thought it might be helpful to others so I tossed it online. Never would I have imagined it would have been integrated by so many applications and the used by community this much. In the last two weeks there have been nearly a million requests from all over the world.

It's seeing data like this and more especially, kind messages like yours that drive me to continue working on it and finally reaching for the goal of open sourcing and making it possible to self-host an instance. I think once I cross that finish line, I have a crazy idea of making a weekly downloadable version of the complete database for offline use.

Two Week Requests Mapped