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+++ title = "The Story Behind cmw" author = ["Elia el Lazkani"] date = 2019-08-31 lastmod = 2019-08-31 tags = ["python", "development"] categories = ["misc"] draft = false +++
A few days ago, Kushal Das shared a curl command.
The command was as follows:
$ curl https://wttr.in/
I, obviously, was curious. I ran it and it was interesting. So it returns the weather right ? Pretty cool huh!
The interest
That got me interested to learn how does this work exactly.
The investigation
I looked at https://wttr.in/ and it seemed to have a GitHub link and a repository. That is very interesting. This is a Python application, one can tell by the code or if you prefer the GitHub bar at the top.
Anyway, one can also tell that this is a Flask application from the following code in the bin/srv.py.
from flask import Flask, request, send_from_directory
APP = Flask(__name__)
By reading the README.md of the repository one can read.
wttr.in uses wego for visualization and various data sources for weather forecast information.
Let's jump to the wego repository then.
wego seems to be a command line application to graph the weather in the terminal.
Great, so what I did with cmw is already done in Go and API'fied by a different project.
My answer to that accusation is obviously this post.
The idea
I played a bit more with https://wttr.in/ and I found it to an interesting API. I am trying to work on my python development foo so to me that was a perfect little project to work on. From my perspective this was simply an API and I am to consume it to put it back in my terminal.
The work
The beginning work was very rough and hidden away in a private repository and was moved later here.
The only thing left from that work is the --format argument which allows you full control over what gets sent.
But again, let's not forget what the real purpose of this project was.
So I decided to make the whole API as accessible as possible from the command line tool I am writing.
$ cmw --help
usage: cmw [-h] [-L LOCATION] [-f FORMAT] [-l LANG] [-m] [-u] [-M] [-z] [-o]
[-w] [-A] [-F] [-n] [-q] [-Q] [-N] [-P] [-p] [-T] [-t TRANSPARENCY]
[--v2] [--version]
Get the weather!
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-L LOCATION, --location LOCATION
Location (look at epilog for more information)
-f FORMAT, --format FORMAT
Query formatting
-l LANG, --lang LANG The language to use
-m, --metric Units: Metric (SI) (default outside US)
-u, --uscs Units: USCS (default in US)
-M, --meter-second Units: Show wind speed in m/s
-z, --zero View: Only current weather
-o, --one View: Current weather & one day
-w, --two View: Current weather & two days
-A, --ignore-user-agent
View: Force ANSI output format
-F, --follow-link View: Show the 'Follow' line from upstream
-n, --narrow View: Narrow version
-q, --quiet View: Quiet version
-Q, --super-quiet View: Super quiet version
-N, --no-colors View: Switch terminal sequences off
-P, --png PNG: Generate PNG file
-p, --add-frame PNG: Add frame around output
-T, --mid-transparency
PNG: Make transparency 150
-t TRANSPARENCY, --transparency TRANSPARENCY
PNG: Set transparency between 0 and 255
--v2 v2 interface of the day
--version show program's version number and exit
Supported Location Types
------------------------
City name: Paris
Unicode name: Москва
Airport code (3 letters): muc
Domain name: @stackoverflow.com
Area code: 94107
GPS coordinates: -78.46,106.79
Special Location
----------------
Moon phase (add ,+US
or ,+France
for these cities): moon
Moon phase for a date: moon@2016-10-25
Supported languages
-------------------
Supported: af da de el et fr fa hu id it nb nl pl pt-br ro ru tr uk vi
$ cmw --location London --lang nl --one
Weerbericht voor: London
\ / Zonnig
.-. 20 °C
― ( ) ― → 19 km/h
`-’ 10 km
/ \ 0.0 mm
┌─────────────┐
┌──────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────┤ za 31 aug ├───────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│ 's Ochtends │ 's Middags └──────┬──────┘ 's Avonds │ 's Nachts │
├──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│ \ / Gedeeltelijk b…│ \ / Gedeeltelijk b…│ Bewolkt │ \ / Gedeeltelijk b…│
│ _ /"".-. 21 °C │ _ /"".-. 23..24 °C │ .--. 20 °C │ _ /"".-. 18 °C │
│ \_( ). ↗ 12-14 km/h │ \_( ). ↗ 18-20 km/h │ .-( ). ↗ 20-25 km/h │ \_( ). → 16-19 km/h │
│ /(___(__) 10 km │ /(___(__) 10 km │ (___.__)__) 10 km │ /(___(__) 10 km │
│ 0.0 mm | 0% │ 0.0 mm | 0% │ 0.0 mm | 0% │ 0.0 mm | 0% │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘
Locatie: London [51.509648,-0.099076]
Conclusion
All I got to say in conclusion is that it was a lot of fun working on cmw and I learned a lot. I'm not going to publish the package on PyPI because seriously, what's the point. But if you are interested in making changes to the repository, make an MR.