A Pythons script project utilizing Google Maps/Twilio/OpenWeatherMap API, AWS EC2 instance, and cron job to automatically text you information (trip duration, estimated arrival time, weather) about your daily work commute.
- Estimated commute/arrival time utilizing Google Maps API
- Text alert to recipient phone number utilizing Twilio API
- Weather information (forecast, temperature, humidity) utilizing OpenWeatherMap API
- Hosted on AWS EC2 Instance (Ubuntu)
- Cron job to automatically run script on designated schedule
Visit https://console.google.com to begin registration for your Google Maps API credentials. After registration, be sure to search for the Directions API as it will need to be enabled under your profie.
Google Maps Directions API documentation:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/directions/overview
Visit https://twilio.com to begin registration for your Twilio API credentials. After registration, be sure to enable a Twilio phone number, which will be the number sending the text messages.
Please note that recipient phone numbers need to be verified before they can receive Twilio text messages.
Twilio SMS API documentation:
https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms
Visit https://openweathermap.org to begin registration for your OpenWeatherMap API credentials.
OpenWeather Map Current Weather API documentation:
https://openweathermap.org/current
This project is hosted on a AWS EC2 instance running Ubuntu. AWS Free Tier membership provides two EC2 instances (one Linux, one Windows) that can each run 750 hours/month, which effectively allows the instances to run constantly without incurring charges or needing tier upgrade for the scope of this project.
Use the wget command to directly download the main .py and .env files:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chan2git/daily_commute_text/main/daily_commute_text.py
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chan2git/daily_commute_text/main/.env
If needed, run the following bash commands in your Ubuntu terminal to install Python and required modules:
pip install python
pip install requests
pip install googlemaps
pip install twilio
pip install python-dotenv
Note
The current version of this project relies on using environment variables stored locally, which is sufficient for the scope of this project. A future updated version of this project will explore using AWS services (such as AWS Secrets Manager) as a a more secure way to store and reference credentials.
The .env file available in this repo is a template. The key names corresponds to variable names found within project script. At a minimum, download the .env file and simply replace the template values in the key-value pairings with the appropriate credentials by using a terminal text editor such as nano.
Alternatively, instead of downlading the repo's .env file, you could create your own .env directly within your Ubuntu instance by using nano. Be sure to match the key names with the variable names it's meant to access (see template). If you make any changes, you must ensure that corresponding key names/variable names match so that the credentials and data can be referenced correctly.
Ensure that the .env file is located in the same directory as daily_commute_text.py
.env template:
a_secret1 = "Google Maps API key"
a_secret2 = "starting address"
a_secret3 = "ending address"
b_secret1 = "Twilio account SID"
b_secret2 = "Twilio account token"
b_secret3 = "Twilio phone number"
b_secret4 = "Recpient phone number"
c_secret1 = "OpenWeatherMap API key"
c_secret2 = "city name"
Ensure that the script is executable by enabling executable permissions with command:
chmod +x daily_commute_text.py
Double check your Ubuntu instance timezone by running the timedatectl command. If the timezone is not correct, it will unintentionally affect your cron job schedule and datetime related data.
To list all available timezones, run the command:
timedatectl list-timezones
To filter for a specific region, you can pipe in grep and the keyword. For example, to display a list of all timezones matching "America", run the command:
timedatectl list-timezones | grep "America"
To change your timezone (using America/New_York as an example), run the following command using sudo:
sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York
A hashbang is a sequence of text placed at the beginning of a script file that typically references and specifies the path to the interpreter (e.g. Python, Bash, etc) that is to be used. Since this script project uses Python, we can give it a Python hashbang, which would eliminate the need to specify the interpreter (in this case, Python3) when setting up our cron job or running the script.
First, double check the Python/Python3 interpreter path by running the command:
which python3
As an example, I may get the response that the python3 interpreter is located in /usr/bin/python3. Next, run the nano daily_commute_text.py command to edit the Python script, add #!/usr/bin/python3 to the very first line of the script file, then save and close.
If you don't add a Python hashbang, to run your script you need to specify the interpreter such as python3 daily_commute_text.py. If you add a Python hasbang, you can simply run ./daily_commute_text.py.
Test your script by running it in terminal. If you get a error that says something similar to /usr/bin/python3^M: bad interpreter: no such file or directory", you may need to convert the script file's line endings from CRLF (Windows) to LF (Linux). If needed, follow the steps below:
Install dos2unix with sudo by running command:
sudo apt-get install dos2unix
Convert your script by running command:
dos2unix daily_commute_text.py
Given the free EC2 instances with AWS Free Tier, we can leave our EC2 instance running 24/7 and utilize cron jobs for this project's scope. A cron job is typically Unix/Linux-based and is an automated job or scheduled task that runs at a designated interval or schedule. Using cron jobs, we can schedule our script to run every Monday through Friday at 7:00am.
To set up a cron job, first run the command:
crontab -e
This will open up a nano-like display. Then you will need to add/modify the below in (without any hashes):
0 7 * * 1-5 /home/ubuntu/daily_commute_text.py
For additional help with learning cron job syntax, visit: https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/cron-job
After hosting our script on a EC2 instance and using cron job to schedule the script every Monday through Friday at 7:00am, we see that the final result is a text message sent to the recipient phone number indicating information regading the temperature, commute time, and arrival time.
