simplesky

SimpleSky

SimpleSky is a promise based, intuitive, and data friendly API Wrapper for Dark Sky. With natural language recognition SimpleSky removes the need to painstakingly acquire manual coordinates to retrieve weather information.

Installation

npm install simplesky --save

Testing

npm test

Usage

Before getting started you'll need to acquire both a Google Maps API Key as well as a Dark Sky API Key.

Once acquired simply create a SimpleSky object and you'll be set up.

const simplesky = require('simplesky');
var weather = new simplesky('YOUR GOOGLE MAPS KEY', 'YOUR DARK SKY KEY');

Optionally if you would like to set your language and unit defaults (as specified in the Dark Sky API Documentation) for all responses you can do so here as well. By default SimpleSky will return all responses in English and weather units based on geographic location.

var weather = new simplesky('YOUR GOOGLE MAPS KEY', 'YOUR DARK SKY KEY', 'zh');

//Alternatively, you can force certain units for all responses

var weather = new simplesky('YOUR GOOGLE MAPS KEY', 'YOUR DARK SKY KEY', 'x-pig-latin','uk2');

Examples

Getting the local temperature

SimpleSky is a complete wrapper for the Dark Sky API, anything you can do with the API you can do here and without headache. SimpleSky is also completely promise based so your code stays clean and easy to read.

All methods within SimpleSky allow for either natural language location input or precise latitude/longitude coordinate input to retrieve JSON formatted weather data.

Here's a simple example in which we print out the current temperature for our local Pizza Hut in Mongolia

weather.getCurrently('Pizza Hut Mongolia').then((response) => {
    console.log(response.temperature);
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});

Alternatively, if you're already working with software in which you get a user's geolocation data, fear not, you can still take advantage of all of SimpleSky's features.

weather.getCurrently(null, 37.0326, -95.6188).then((response) => {
    console.log(response.temperature);
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});

Customizing weather output

SimpleSky allows you to customize the weather output the Dark Sky API returns to help save you additional cache space. To do so will require taking advantage of the getWeather() method.

SimpleSky uses the exact same naming scheme used in the Dark Sky API documentation. So in order to remove certain blocks from the weather output, we simply pass them in with the same names.

Once again, all methods within SimpleSky accept longitude and latitude input.

//Remove the alerts and flags blocks from the weather output
weather.getWeather("Pirates Museum Madagascar", null, null, ['alerts', 'flags']).then((response) => {
    console.log(response);
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});

If you would like to isolate only a single block, methods have already been written that exclude all irrelevant data.

For reference these are

getCurrently();
getMinutely(); 
getHourly(); 
getDaily();
getFull();

//NOTE: Not all locations output minutely and hourly data

Time Machine Requests

To see weather data for a date far into the future or into the past simply use the getTimeMachine() method.

Specifying the time of your request couldn't be easier. Simply pass in your offset in the following format as a single string

'[+/-] {years}Y {months}M {weeks}w {days}d {hours}h {minutes}m {seconds}s {milliseconds}ms'

To see the weather data for a certain location three years and two months from now simply do the following.

weather.getTimeMachine("Brooklyn Bridge", "+3y +2M").then((response) => {
    console.log(response);
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});

Alternatively, if you would rather get data for a specific time as opposed to getting data from an offset you can do so from this method as well. Simply replace the offset with a UNIX timestamp to get weather data for that specific time.

weather.getTimeMachine("Brooklyn Bridge", 255657600).then((response) => {
    console.log(response);
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});

Similar to the getWeather() method, getTimeMachine() also has an exclude field if you would like to isolate certain blocks from the response.

Extending hourly data

If you'd like to get the weather data for the next 168 hours as opposed to the next 48, simply do the following.

weather.getHourly("UT Austin", null, null, true).then((response) => {
    console.log(response);
}).catch(error) =>{
    console.log(error);
});

Misc.

Getting coordinate data for locations

It's also possible to use SimpleSky to leverage the Google Maps API to get coordinate data for any location. Data is returned as a JSON object with lat and lng fields.

weather.getCoordinates('North Pole').then((response) => {
    console.log(response.lat);
    console.log(response.lng);
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});