Terminal Weather 🌥 🌧 🌞 ❄️

A minimal and configurable command-line tool for displaying the weather in your location, optimized for re-rendering in your terminal prompt. If you hit enter a bunch of times in your terminal, if you have terminal-weather embedded in your prompt, you will get accurate weather with the occasional micro-delay or error message.

Requirements

• An openweathermap.org API key. You can generate one here, but you will need to register with OpenWeather first.
• Node 8 and up

Installation

• Run npm install -g terminal-weather
• Run terminal-weather configure to set it up. You will be prompted for your open weathermap.org API key as well the default temperature unit.

Which Services It Uses

Terminal-weather uses the following APIs:

• ip-api.com to map your ip to a location.
• openweathermap.org to retrieve the current weather for your location.

Caching and Module loading

• terminal-weather sets the default CACHE_INTERVAL_MINUTES to 10 minutes for regular use because this is the update frequency of Open Weather's API. The rest of the time, terminal-weather prints a cached value. Unless you pass an -n or --invalidate-cache flag. This is especially useful if you want the weather in your terminal prompt.

• Speaking of weather in your terminal prompt, terminal-weather loads in a minimal and progressive way. Because the creator wants the weather in his terminal, but doesn't want a janky experience, there are -p and --prompt flags that circumvent the standard module loading procedure and fetched cached data. Only the modules required for that use-case are loaded. In case of a cache expiration, the additional modules required to retreive new weather data are loaded. This provides a near-seamless terminal experience when embedding terminal-weather in your prompt (see below).

Usage

    usage: terminal-weather [ option | command ]

    tw                           gets weather, maybe from cache, maybe from owm
    tw -n, --invalidate-cache    invalidates cache, gets weather
    tw -p, --prompt              gets weather, prints w/ no newline
    tw --help, -h                prints help
    tw info                      prints config values
    tw configure                 configure tw

    format values:
      i: icon
      t: text
      l: low
      h: high
      w: weekday
      u: temp units

    example format string: "i l/hu"
    example output: 🌧  66/76°f

    Configuration:

    Your configuration path is fixed at ~/.twconfig. It could look like this:

      APPID=[...]
      UNITS=f
      FORMAT=i
      DAYS=1
      CACHED_WEATHER=🌧
      CACHED_AT=1632541512508
      CACHE_INTERVAL_MINUTES=10
      VERSION=1.0.0

Note: I haven't had the time to find a good arg parsing library for typescript, so currently the argument parsing isn't great. For now, pass one argument or option at a time :(

Configuration

• Run terminal-weather configure and give terminal-weather the values it needs to store so it can continually query the api.

Getting terminal-weather into your terminal prompt

If you want to include terminal-weather in your bash prompt, here is what you need to add to your ~/.bashrc:

    # a function to insert the terminal-weather command into your PS1 variable
    set_bash_prompt() {
        PS1="$(terminal-weather -p)\u@[\h]$ $(history -n)"
    }

    # include above fn in prompt command variable so the prompt is reset each time it is rendered
    PROMPT_COMMAND="set_bash_prompt; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

Notes / Tips

terminal-weather's performance degrades after sourcing your ~/.bashrc.

If you update your display, units and/or format string, the update will not be visible until the cache expires. To make the effects immediately visible, pass the -n flag to explicitly invalidate the cache at the same time. E.g.:

terminal-weather -n
terminal-weather --invalidate-cache

Removing terminal-weather

• First (definitely do this first!!!), remove terminal weather call from the bash prompt in your ~/.bashrc file
• Then run npm uninstall -g terminal-weather.