(status: alpha/brain-dump)

Weather

Simple private API to get current weather information at a lon/lat position from Environment Canada (EC).

Requirements

• composer
• php8 (tested with PHP 8.2)
• php8-json
• php8-mbstring
• php8-openssl
• php8-pdo
• php8-pdo_pgsql
• php8-simplexml
• postgresql (tested with 14.9)
• postgis (postgresql extension)
• webserver (tested with nginx and php-fpm)

APKBUILD

Alpine Linux package available here: /chimo/apkbuilds/weather

How does it work

The list of weather stations[1] published by Environment Canada and their lat/lon locations[2] are imported into the database.

When we pass a lat/lon pair to our API, we use PostGIS to find the closest weather station, and then query the proper EC endpoint to get current weather[2] from that weather station.

[1] https://dd.weather.gc.ca/citypage_weather/xml/siteList.xml
[2] example: https://dd.weather.gc.ca/citypage_weather/xml/BC/s0000671_e.xml

Configure

• Run composer install in the "private" folder
• Copy "config.dist.php" to "config.php" and edit the values

If you want to bootstrap the database with the weather station information, use pg_restore with the dump provided in "private/weather.sql.dump"

If you want to import the weather station data yourself:

• Create a new database
• Enable the postgis features on it
• Run the "create_table.php" script in "private/src/scripts"
• Run the "import_sites.php" script in "private/src/scripts" (this takes a while)

Request

curl -H "secret: xxx" https://example.org?lat=45.00&lon=-75.00

Response

{
    "condition": "Sunny",
    "temperature": "16",
    "humidity": "12"
}