🌦️ WeatherBot

Automated Weather Forecasting & Alert System for South Bend, Indiana

WeatherBot is a robust Python application designed to provide real-time weather updates and severe weather alerts via Twitter (X). Leveraging the National Weather Service (NWS) API, it ensures the community stays informed with accurate, timely, and automated broadcasts.

Live at https://x.com/SBforecast

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📋 Table of Contents

• Features
• Tech Stack
• Configuration
• Local Development
• Deployment

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🌟 Features

• Scheduled Forecasts: Automatically tweets current conditions and short-term forecasts five times daily (3 AM, 7 AM, 12 PM, 5 PM, and 10 PM).
• Real-Time Alerts: Monitors NWS feeds every 5 minutes to broadcast severe weather warnings immediately.
• Smart Caching: Implements a caching mechanism to prevent duplicate alerts for the same weather event.
• Resilient Architecture: Built with apscheduler for reliable task scheduling and error handling for network requests.
• Live Data: Fetches precise, localized data directly from api.weather.gov.

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🛠 Tech Stack

• Language: Python 3.11+
• APIs:
  • National Weather Service API (Weather Data)
  • Twitter API v2 (Broadcasting)
• Key Libraries:
  • requests & requests-oauthlib: HTTP networking and OAuth authentication.
  • apscheduler: Advanced background scheduling.
  • flask: Lightweight web server (required for cloud hosting health checks).
  • python-dotenv: Environment variable management.

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⚙️ Configuration

The application requires the following environment variables to function. These can be set in a .env file for local development or in your cloud provider's dashboard.

Variable	Description	Default / Example
CITY	Target city name for display	South Bend, Indiana
LAT	Latitude of the location	41.6764
LON	Longitude of the location	-86.2520
TWITTER_API_KEY	Twitter Consumer Key	...
TWITTER_API_SECRET	Twitter Consumer Secret	...
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN	Twitter Access Token	...
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET	Twitter Access Token Secret	...

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💻 Local Development

To run WeatherBot locally on your machine:

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/weatherbot.git
   cd weatherbot

2. Install dependencies

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Configure Environment Create a .env file in the root directory and add your API keys (see Configuration).

4. Run the Bot

   python weatherbot.py

   The bot will start a local web server at http://localhost:5000 and begin its scheduling loop.

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🚀 Deployment

This project is optimized for deployment on Render as a Web Service (Free Tier compatible).

Deploying with Render Blueprints

1. Push to GitHub: Ensure your code is in a GitHub repository.
2. New Blueprint: Go to the Render Dashboard, click New, and select Blueprint.
3. Connect Repo: Select your weatherbot repository.
4. Auto-Configuration: Render will detect the render.yaml file included in this project.
5. Credentials: You will be prompted to input your Twitter API credentials securely during the setup.
6. Launch: Click Apply. Render will build the environment and start the web service.

The service is configured to run continuously. Render will ping the web server to keep it alive.

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Developed by [Your Name]