Weather API 🌦️

Welcome to the Weather API project! This simple yet powerful API provides current weather information for cities around the world, leveraging real-time data from the Visual Crossing Weather API. It also utilizes Redis for efficient caching to ensure fast responses and reduced API calls.

Project Overview

This project was built as a learning exercise and a portfolio piece to demonstrate my understanding of:

• Building and structuring a FastAPI application.
• Integrating and fetching data from a 3rd-party API.
• Implementing Redis for in-memory caching to improve performance.
• Following best practices for error handling and environment variable management.

The main goal was to develop a functional and optimized API while deepening my understanding of modern backend development techniques.

Features 🚀

• Get Current Weather: Fetches real-time weather data for a given city.
• Caching with Redis: Stores data for 12 hours to speed up repeat requests and minimize external API usage.
• Error Handling: Provides user-friendly error messages for invalid city names, missing API keys, and network issues.
• Automatic Documentation: FastAPI’s built-in Swagger UI and ReDoc make it easy to understand and interact with the API.

Technologies Used 🛠️

• Python: The core programming language used for development.
• FastAPI: A modern, fast (high-performance) web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+.
• Redis: Used as an in-memory data structure store for caching.
• requests: A simple, yet powerful HTTP library for making API requests.
• dotenv: For managing environment variables securely.

How It Works 🔍

1. Make a Request: Clients can request weather data for a specific city using the /weather endpoint.
2. Check the Cache: The API first checks Redis to see if the data for the city is already cached.
3. Fetch Fresh Data: If the data is not cached or has expired, the API fetches fresh data from the Visual Crossing API.
4. Cache and Return: The new data is cached in Redis and returned to the client.

Example Request & Response

Endpoint: /weather?city=London

Sample Response:

{
  "city": "London",
  "temperature": 50.9,
  "description": "Partially cloudy"
}