slack-forecast

A Slack bot that sends weather reports!

I use The Dark Sky Forecast API for the weather data. Also use Slack's python-slackclient for sending the messages.

Setup

• Clone the repo
  • git clone https://github.com/ortizmj12/slack_forecast.git or
  • git clone [email protected]:ortizmj12/slack_forecast.git
• cd into the repo directory and create a new virtualenv
  • virtualenv venv
• Install the dependencies
  • pip install -r requirements
• Set the FORECAST_API and SLACK_TOKEN environment variables with the appropriate values
  • export FORECAST_API=<your_API_here>
  • export SLACK_TOKEN=<your_token_here>
• Set the variables in config.yaml
  • Latitude/longitude of the location you want to get weather reports for
  • Channel you want the messages sent to
  • Name of the Slack bot user you're using
• Activate the virtualenv
  • source venv/bin/activate
• Send the weather to Slack
  • python forecast.py

Cron job it

I created a cron job to automagically send the weather messages every morning. Maybe not the best way to do it, but I created a bash file to run the script. Why?

1. Because I have environment variables set, I needed to source my .bashrc
2. Because I did this in a virtualenv, I needed to use that virtual environment's python executable

Here's the syntax of the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

source /home/user/.bashrc
cd /home/user/git/slack_forecast/
/home/user/git/slack_forecast/venv/bin/python /home/user/git/slack_forecast/forecast.py