Absolutely — I’ll rebuild the entire README.md with clean formatting, proper spacing, headings, icons, consistent style, and great readability for GitHub.

This version is copy-paste ready, fully structured, and looks professional + human-written.

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🌤️ Weatherstack API Testing Lab

A compact Python project for API testing, offline test design, and generating weather cards — powered by CI.

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🧪 Overview

This project originally started as a tiny API testing sandbox and gradually evolved into a practical, hands-on QA mini-framework. It now includes:

• ✔️ Live API tests against the Weatherstack service
• ✔️ Resilient test behavior (auto-skip on 401, rate-limits, etc.)
• ✔️ Offline tests (no network required)
• ✔️ A PNG weather card generator
• ✔️ GitHub Actions CI with HTML test reports + generated images

It’s intentionally lightweight, readable, and useful both as a personal lab and as a portfolio piece for QA/SDET roles.

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🏗️ Tech Stack

Component	Purpose
Python 3.12	Base language
pytest	Test runner
requests	HTTP client
responses	Offline mocking
Pillow (PIL)	Weather card PNG creation
GitHub Actions	CI pipeline

No heavy frameworks — everything is simple and dependency-minimal.

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🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/LaidonerS/api-testing-lab
cd api-testing-lab

2. Create and activate your virtual environment

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

3. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

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🔑 Weatherstack API Key Setup

Create a free account at: https://weatherstack.com/

Then export your key:

export WEATHERSTACK_API_KEY="your_real_key_here"

Verify:

echo $WEATHERSTACK_API_KEY

If it prints your key, you’re good to go.

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🧪 Running Tests

Run all tests (live + offline):

pytest -v

Run only offline tests:

pytest -k offline -v

Run only Weatherstack live tests:

pytest -k "weather and not offline" -v

🟡 Built-in Real-World Resilience

Weather APIs love to throw:

• 401 Unauthorized
• 429 rate_limit_reached
• {"success": false, "error": ...}

This project automatically skips tests when those happen, so your CI stays green and readable.

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🎨 Generating a Weather Card (PNG)

This project includes a script that grabs the current weather and renders it into a simple PNG “card.”

Run it like this:

export WEATHERSTACK_API_KEY="your_key"
CITY="Bangkok" python generate_weather_image.py

You will get:

weather_Bangkok.png

The card includes:

• City & country
• Temperature and “feels like”
• Weather description
• Humidity
• Background color based on temperature category

It’s a small feature, but surprisingly handy for dashboards or quick-sharing.

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🧱 Project Structure

api-testing-lab/
│
├── utils/
│   ├── api_client.py                # Auth + GET wrapper for Weatherstack
│   └── weather_models.py            # WeatherSnapshot model + temp categories
│
├── tests/
│   ├── test_weather_current.py      # Live API tests
│   ├── test_weather_parsing_offline.py  # Offline JSON structure tests
│   └── test_weather_models_offline.py   # Model & categorization tests
│
├── generate_weather_image.py        # PNG weather card generator
│
├── .github/workflows/tests.yml      # CI pipeline
└── requirements.txt                 # Dependencies

Each piece is intentionally kept small and straightforward.

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🤖 Continuous Integration (GitHub Actions)

Every push to main automatically triggers:

1. Dependency installation

2. pytest execution (with HTML report)

3. Weather card generation

4. Artifact upload:

   • report.html
   • weather_<city>.png

To enable CI, set the repo secret:

WEATHERSTACK_API_KEY

Path: GitHub → Settings → Secrets and Variables → Actions

You can download CI artifacts under: Actions → select a run → Artifacts

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❓ Why Weatherstack?

A real API means real problems:

• Authentication failures
• Rate limiting
• Odd error structures
• Occasional city mismatches
• Network variance

This makes it a perfect API for practicing robust test automation — not the “clean textbook” examples, but the messy real stuff.

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💡 Ideas for Future Expansion

Some potential next steps:

• Add async tests using httpx
• Add Playwright UI tests for viewing weather cards
• Create a CLI tool: weathercli London
• Add caching or retry logic
• Generate weekly trend charts
• Build a tiny FastAPI wrapper around WeatherSnapshot

This repo is intentionally flexible — easy to grow if you want more challenges.

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🙌 Final Notes

This project aims to be:

• Authentic
• Practical
• Easy to read
• Demonstrative of real-world API testing challenges
• Useful as a QA/SDET portfolio reference

If you'd like help expanding it, polishing it further, or adding advanced features, just ask — happy to guide you through the next steps!

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If you want a “badge section” (build passing ✨), screenshots, or a more playful intro, I can add those too.