terminal-weather

terminal-weather

Terminal weather is a minimal, flexible command-line tool for displaying the current weather in your location, optimized for rapid re-rendering in your terminal prompt.

Requirements

• An openweathermap.org API key
• NodeJS v7.0 and npm

Dependencies

• neodoc, a revised implementation of the docopt language

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 adheres to openweathermap.org's limit of 1 http call per ten-minute interval. The rest of the time it prints a cached value.
• terminal-weather loads in a progressive way. Because the most frequent case is retrieving cached data, only the modules required for that are loaded. In case of a cache expiration, the additional modules required to retreive new weather data are loaded. The point is to maintain a seamless terminal experience when embedding terminal-weather in your prompt (see below).

Usage

    terminal-weather

    Usage: terminal-weather
       or: terminal-weather [options],                  ex: terminal-weather -p 
       or: terminal-weather configure,                  ex: terminal-weather configure
       or: terminal-weather show (display | config),    ex: terminal-weather show display
       or: terminal-weather uninstall,                  ex: terminal-weather uninstall 

    Options:
        -h, --help                                      print this usage page
        -n, --no-cache                                  invalidate cache before printing weather string  
        -p, --prompt                                    print weather string with no trailing new line. Useful for embedding in your terminal prompt.
        -d, --display=DISPLAY_MODE                      get or set display mode.
        -f, --format=FORMAT_STRING                      get or set the format string determining the weather string output.
        -u, --units=UNIT_TYPE                           get or set temp unit type.

Tips

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 --display=icon
terminal-weather -nd=icon 

Controlling the Output

To configure the order of terminal-weather's information, pass a string of characters from the list below to the format command.

T: Temperature

D: Display

The default format string is 'T D ', which renders something like '73° F clouds ', assuming that your display setting is text. The format string is space-sensitive, so you can control the spacing how you want.

Example: $ terminal-weather format 'D T '.

Note: the following weather information is forthcoming for the openweathermap.org api:

H: Humidity

P: Atmospheric Pressure

R: Range (hi/lo)

Configuration

• Run terminal-weather configure and give terminal-weather the values it needs to store so it can continually query the api.
• This configuration file is stored in the application's root directory (run terminal-weather show config to see the location of this file).

Getting terminal-weather into your terminal prompt

If you want to include terminal-weather in your bash prompt, there are a couple things you need to do:

• Make sure that /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH so that your shell can locate it. If after installing terminal weather, you can't run terminal-weather from your terminal, you may have not installed it globally (using the -g flag).

• Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file:

   # a function to insert the terminal-weather bash fn inside the 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"
  

Known Issues

Terminal weather's responsiveness seems to degrade if you source your ~/.bashrc multiple times from within a shell. Try running exec $SHELL -l.

Removing terminal-weather

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