Showing The Weather In Tmux

The weather is unpredictable here on the North coast of Poland where I live, especially around this time of year. On those infrequent occasions when I do leave my apartment (I work from home), I’m never sure how warmly I should dress or how careful I should be on the road — cold-snaps are increasingly frequent.

I spend most of my day staring at my terminal, so that’s where I’d like to keep all of the information I care about. My Tmux status bar currently contains my laptop’s remaining battery life, the current time and date, and now the local weather. Here’s how that looks:

We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

The first thing we need to do is find our approximate geographical coordinates. I say approximate because I’m not willing to pay money for a high level of accuracy. Kinda-sorta where I live is good enough. Curiously enough, Google’s geolocation API seemed to be broken for me and — after some research — many other people.

I found a free service called IP-API. As the name suggests, it returns your location based on your IP address. The service allows up to 150 requests per minute which is plenty for our needs — we won’t be making requests more than once per second.

Running the following command gives us a collection of values about our geographical data, separated by commas:

curl --silent http://ip-api.com/csv success,Poland,PL,PM,"Pomeranian Voivodeship",Gdańsk,80-009,54.3608,18.6583,Europe/Warsaw,"Neostrada Plus","Neostrada Plus",<redacted>,<redacted>

Using the cut command, we can split the comma-separated values on those commas, and the -f flag allows us to choose which field we’re interested in. For my script, I’m pulling fields six, eight, and nine to grab the city, latitude, and longitude values respectively.

LOCATION=$(curl --silent http://ip-api.com/csv) CITY=$(echo "$LOCATION" | cut -d , -f 6) LAT=$(echo "$LOCATION" | cut -d , -f 8) LON=$(echo "$LOCATION" | cut -d , -f 9)

You’ll notice I’m being careful to wrap each of those $LOCATION variables in double-quotes to prevent word-splitting. If you start writing more Bash scripts (and you should), this should become a habit.

If you don’t move around much, you can skip the geolocation step and just hard-code your geographical coordinates. I do travel quite frequently, so I want the weather in my status bar to reflect the weather outside.

Show Me The Data

Now that we have our location, we need to ask another service for our weather data. There are a number of services online that provide an API for querying weather data, but again, I am not willing to pay actual money for this; it’s just for fun.

I found a service for querying weather data called OpenWeatherMap. You’ll need to register an account with them to obtain an API key, but they allow up to 60 requests per minute which again is enough for our needs.

If we send a request to OpenWeatherMap with our geographical coordinates and our API key, the service returns a big lump of JSON full of the data you need. Parsing this JSON string is too hairy a task for any native UNIX tools, but you can use your favourite package manager to install a JSON parser called jq. Accessing fields with jq is syntactically the same as looking up array indexes and object properties in JavaScript.

WEATHER=$(curl --silent http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather\?lat="$LAT"\&lon="$LON"\&APPID="$API_KEY"\&units=metric) CATEGORY=$(echo "$WEATHER" | jq .weather[0].id) TEMP="$(echo "$WEATHER" | jq .main.temp | cut -d . -f 1)°C" WIND_SPEED="$(echo "$WEATHER" | jq .wind.speed | awk '{print int($1+0.5)}')ms" ICON=$(weather_icon "$CATEGORY") printf "%s" "$CITY:$ICON $TEMP, $WIND_SPEED"

I only care about whole numbers for temperature and wind speed, so I’m using cut and awk to truncate and round those values respectively. I truncate the temperature instead of rounding it because I am originally from London, which means I have pessimism as a hereditary trait.

The weather_icon function simply maps weather category IDs to some emoji. You’ll see it in the full script below. You’ll notice too that I’m asking for the data in metric units. You can switch that to imperial if you’re so inclined.

Get In My Status If You Want To Live

The last step is to save the script somewhere appropriate — for me it’s under ~/.bin/weather — and then run a chmod u+x ~/.bin/weather to make the script executable. The weather script can now be called from your Tmux configuration.

When I open up my ~/.tmux.conf file, I have these lines:

set -g status-right-length 50 set -g status-right '#[fg=green][#[default]#($HOME/.bin/weather)#[fg=green]] #[fg=green][#[fg=blue]%Y-%m-%d #[fg=white]%H:%M#[default]#[fg=green]] #[fg=green][#($HOME/.bin/battery)#[fg=green]]' set -g status-interval 1

The first line sets the available length for the right-side of my status bar. I’m not sure what the default length is, but it isn’t long enough to display everything I want without truncating. The second line is my literal status line. I use a combination of colours, whitespace and punctuation to separate the different parts of my status line. The third line tells Tmux that I want to update my status line every second, which is important for telling accurate time.

And that’s all there is to it! For completeness, here’s the entire weather script:

#!/bin/bash # # Weather # ======= # # By Jezen Thomas <[email protected]> # # This script sends a couple of requests over the network to retrieve # approximate location data, and the current weather for that location. This is # useful if for example you want to display the current weather in your tmux # status bar. # There are three things you will need to do before using this script. # # 1. Install jq with your package manager of choice (homebrew, apt-get, etc.) # 2. Sign up for a free account with OpenWeatherMap to grab your API key # 3. Add your OpenWeatherMap API key where it says API_KEY # OPENWEATHERMAP API KEY (place yours here) API_KEY="<redacted>" set -e # Not all icons for weather symbols have been added yet. If the weather # category is not matched in this case statement, the command output will # include the category ID. You can add the appropriate emoji as you go along. # # Weather data reference: http://openweathermap.org/weather-conditions weather_icon() { case $1 in 500) echo 🌦 ;; 800) echo ☀️ ;; 801) echo 🌤 ;; 803) echo ⛅️ ;; 804) echo ☁️ ;; *) echo "$1" esac } LOCATION=$(curl --silent http://ip-api.com/csv) CITY=$(echo "$LOCATION" | cut -d , -f 6) LAT=$(echo "$LOCATION" | cut -d , -f 8) LON=$(echo "$LOCATION" | cut -d , -f 9) WEATHER=$(curl --silent http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather\?lat="$LAT"\&lon="$LON"\&APPID="$API_KEY"\&units=metric) CATEGORY=$(echo "$WEATHER" | jq .weather[0].id) TEMP="$(echo "$WEATHER" | jq .main.temp | cut -d . -f 1)°C" WIND_SPEED="$(echo "$WEATHER" | jq .wind.speed | awk '{print int($1+0.5)}')ms" ICON=$(weather_icon "$CATEGORY") printf "%s" "$CITY:$ICON $TEMP, $WIND_SPEED"

n.b. I realise I could just stand on my balcony to see what the weather is like, but what kind of nerd would I be if I didn’t script it somehow?!