weatherBot

A Twitter bot for weather. Powered by Dark Sky.

Note: Any language or wording suggestions are appreciated and should be submitted as an issue or pull request.

Example bots can be found at @MorrisMNWeather and @WeatherByBrian.

weatherBot tweets the current weather condition at scheduled times. If a special weather event is happening, it will tweet that (outside of the scheduled times). weatherBot can also tweet the current day's forecast.

Features

• Current conditions at scheduled times
• Daily forecast at a scheduled time
• Severe weather alerts issued by a governmental authority
• Real time "special" events (precipitation, fog, extreme temperatures, wind, etc.)
• Granular throttling of special events
• Variable location for all tweets based on the locations of a user's recent tweets
• Fully customizable text for tweets via a YAML file
• International support for timezones, units, and languages
• Twitter geolocation in each tweet
• Console and file based logging
• Send the traceback of a crash as a direct message
• Cache runtime information to a file for easy resuming
• Configuration file
• Deploy via Heroku or Docker

Install Dependencies

Run the following from the repository root directory to install the needed dependencies.

# The minimum dependencies needed to run weatherBot
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# Additional dependencies needed for testing, linting, and validating
pip3 install -r requirements-dev.txt

Use

weatherBot.py has been built for Python 3 (tested with 3.6 and above). Legacy Python is not supported.

1. Set your location and other settings in weatherBot.conf
2. Set your API keys and secrets as environmental variables (recommended) or in keys.py

python3 weatherBot.py weatherBot.conf

You're all set!

Settings and Customizing

Configuration File

Many features of weatherBot can be customized in a conf file, using the INI configuration format. This ships with a file named weatherBot.conf, but can be called whatever you'd like. Each option has a comment above it describing its purpose. By default, each option is commented out with a semi-colons (;). This shows the default value and provides an example of a valid configuration.

If you want a clean conf file, feel free to remove all but the settings you set, they are all optional. The section headers must remain in the file.

API Keys

The Twitter app consumer key and secret as well as the access token and token secret are located either in environmental variables (recommended) or in the keys.py file. The script will pull in the keys from the environmental variables over the keys.py file. See https://apps.twitter.com to get your keys and secrets. The names of the environmental variables are as follows: WEATHERBOT_CONSUMER_KEY, WEATHERBOT_CONSUMER_SECRET, WEATHERBOT_ACCESS_TOKEN, WEATHERBOT_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET, and WEATHERBOT_DARKSKY_KEY. Entering keys into keys.py is not required if you have entered them as environmental variables.

Strings

The language as well as the text used for all tweets can be edited or added in strings.yml. Remember to set the units and path/filename (defaults to strings.yml) in the configuration file.

Variable Location

Enable variable location to have the location for weather change. The Twitter username in the variable location user setting will be used to determine this location. The specified user must tweet with location fairly regularly (at least every 20 tweets, not including retweets), or the manually entered location will be used. The most recent tweet with a location will be used to get the location for weather. For example, say the given user tweets from Minneapolis, MN one day. Minneapolis will be used as the location indefinitely until a new tweet with location is posted or if 20 new tweets have been posted that do not contain a location. weatherBot checks the user's timeline every 30 minutes for updates in location. The human readable Twitter location will also be added to the beginning of each tweet. For example, in the same case as earlier, "Minneapolis, MN: " would be prefixed to every tweet.

Deploying

Head over to the wiki for some examples of deploying weatherBot.

Task Runner

The following tasks are available through invoke.

• invoke lint

Docstring:
  Use PyLint to check for errors and enforce a coding standard.
  This will, by default, use the PyLint configuration found in '.pylintrc',
  but can accept a different path.

Options:
  -e STRING, --extra=STRING      Extra Python files to lint in addition to the
                                 default.
  -p STRING, --pylintrc=STRING   Path to a pylintrc file for configuring
                                 PyLint.

• invoke clean

Docstring:
  Clean (delete) files. If passed with no arguments, nothing is deleted.

Options:
  -b, --bytecode              Remove bytecode files matching the pattern
                              '**/*.pyc'.
  -c, --cache                 Remove the '.wbcache.p' file.
  -e STRING, --extra=STRING   Remove any extra files passed in here.

• invoke validateyaml

Docstring:
  Use yamllint to check for errors and enforce a markup standard for the strings YAML file.
  By default this will use the '.yamllint' config file to validate 'strings.yml'.

Options:
  -f STRING, --filename=STRING     Path to the strings YAML file to validate.
  -y STRING, --yamllintrc=STRING   Path to a yamllintrc file for configuring
                                   PyLint.

• invoke test

Docstring:
  Runs tests and reports on code coverage.
  Keys need to be entered in 'keys.py' or set as environmental variables.

Options:
  -r, --report   Flag to print a coverage report

Tools Used

• Tweepy
• Dark Sky API
• python-forecast.io