`curl wttr.in`: Weather in your terminal

by cercatrova • 4 years ago

368 143 4 years ago

If only there's a $PS1 version

queuebert3• 4 years ago

That would be cool, but how would you condense the information enough that it's both useful and doesn't take up 2/3 of a line?

CrispinS• 4 years ago

Emojis? For the current weather, a single emoji could convey quite a lot; e.g. a snowflake for sub-60 weather (I have a low tolerance for cold), a sun for 60-80, fire emoji for 80+...

Now, I don't know if anyone truly needs the weather in their terminal prompt, but it is doable.

LeonB• 4 years ago

It’s provides different formats, I was using this one in the past from Powershell

invoke-restmethod wttr.in/?format=4

…and I think it was quite compact

derwiki• 4 years ago

I might be a heathen, but my PS1 is as long as it wants to be, and ends with \n$

enriquto• 4 years ago

how would you condense the information enough that it's both useful and doesn't take up 2/3 of a line?

There's a method that takes 0 space: just change the color of the prompt symbol depending on the weather status (sunny, cloudy, raining, snowing).

behnamoh8• 4 years ago

i know you’re referring to the shell prompt, but it reminded me that PowerShell file extension is also *.ps1 (which I find strange as I’m not used to seeing numbers in file extensions).

didn’t this really come up when MS was designing PowerShell?

smegsicle2• 4 years ago

i think they count the namespace pollution as free advertising

mrweasel• 4 years ago

It might just be me, but I never saw the usefulness in widgets that shows the current weather, at your current location. I mean can’t you just look out the window?

Stuffing a three days weather report into $PS1 might be to much information for a prompt.

jona-f• 4 years ago

I have to get up and walk to the window, so looking it up in the terminal is much faster. But I agree that it feels somewhat detached from nature. Also the thermometer at the window varies a lot with direct sunlight or wind, so i find these weather services give a better estimate to what i should be wearing when i go outside.

teddyh3• 4 years ago

I’m reminded of the old discussion of which clock program for X11 consumed the least resources and screen size. It concluded with something like: “Of course, the clock which consumes no resources, and does not take any screen space, is the clock which hangs on your wall.”.

prezjordan• 4 years ago

Cute idea!

innocenat3• 4 years ago

I have to scroll all they way down to the buttom to find the information source -- WorldWeatherOnline. Does people not care about where their whether data is sourced from?

Living in Japan, I have always been wary of these type of service, since I find a lot of them really inaccurate. And I just checked, Tokyo show 15C on that website, while high resolution current weather information from Japan Metrological Agency show 18C.

LeoPanthera• 4 years ago

This is why I like Windy.com. They give you the output directly from the various weather models and you can actually see them all in parallel or just pick whichever one works best for your location.

brewdad3• 4 years ago

Living in the PNW where predicting snowfall can be problematic to say the least, I love looking at the various windy.com models. One particular storm, that lead to about an inch of sticking snow this past winter had ranges from 2-20 inches predicted by the various models. The worst part is the 2 inch prediction came from the model that is generally considered the least reliable for our area.

is_true2• 4 years ago

I think you are comparing a weather model with the current reading from a weather station.

innocenat3• 4 years ago

So you are saying that "weather right now" shouldn't be a reading from weather station?

cmeacham982• 4 years ago

I'll admit I'm just speculating because I don't know much about weather and weather data collection, but is it not possible there's a 3 degree difference between 2 different places of measurement in Tokyo (i.e. both are correct to some degree?)

_moof• 4 years ago

is it not possible there's a 3 degree difference between 2 different places of measurement in Tokyo

I don't know about Tokyo in particular, but generally speaking, for a large coastal city that wouldn't surprise me at all.

teaearlgraycold• 4 years ago

while high resolution current weather information from Japan Metrological Agency

They are complaining about location precision. It might be very coarse (equivalent to US zip code size). It’s a valid complaint. I use Dark Sky on iOS because it’s accurate to 10 meters or so.

innocenat3• 4 years ago

I checked about dozen station in Tokyo and they were the same.

e-dant• 4 years ago

Metrological?

timonoko• 4 years ago

Seems to be mostly Airport data. Helsinki Airport is not in Helsinki, so this information is quite useless. Also we do not measure windspeed in km/h.

yxhuvud• 4 years ago

Windspeed unit was configurable though.

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

Does people not care about where their whether data is sourced from?

Weather or not I care is really not your concern.

usr11063• 4 years ago

I agree. I always avoid these aggregators that offer world-wide coverage. The quality of the data is often questionable.

As a cyclist I'm mostly interested in rain. So I check the rain radar of the national weather service, which has excellent resolution.

Even when travelling I spend 5 minutes to dig out the relevant local pages of a national weather service and bookmark them. Not something I have to do so frequently that any kind of automation would be needed.

Weather apps and this client are a solutions in search of a real problem. Yes, it's a nice demo, I like working with the terminal. But I am not working with weather all day long.

cmeacham982• 4 years ago

There's also `curl v2.wttr.in`, but imho I like the original better.

cercatrova5• 4 years ago

I like this command, as an alias, it combines all wttr.in's versions (v3 doesn't quite seem to work yet):

    alias weather="curl wttr.in && curl v2.wttr.in && curl v3.wttr.in"

mcint• 4 years ago

v3 does work, but you need to guess the appropriate region.

The Bayern.sxl example works, and is a good way to prove to yourself that your terminal is compatible, instead of your hoped-for region not being indexed.

    curl v3.wttr.in/Bayern.sxl

    curl v3.wttr.in/California.sxl

taf2• 4 years ago

This is really neat...

vim ~/.bashrc

``` alias weather='/usr/bin/curl wttr.in' ``` :wq

and now:

weather

cercatrova5• 4 years ago

Heh, I did the exact same thing. I actually did

    alias weather="curl wttr.in && curl v2.wttr.in && curl v3.wttr.in"

so that it shows me the temperature chart and map as well. Well, v3's map isn't working so I commented that out for now but they say it should work in the future.

behnamoh8• 4 years ago

but this curls the app each time you invoke it!

Kim_Bruning4• 4 years ago

if you do

curl wttr.in/:help

Tou get a help document, which also shows you a way to get a suggested bash function; to wit:

curl wttr.in/:bash.function

dgl2• 4 years ago

Remember with this kind of thing you're trusting the remote site with access to your terminal emulator. There have been various security problems with some more advanced terminals and escape sequences in the past[1][2].

Personally I think it's a cute thing and have implemented some similar little easter eggs to this via: curl ip.wtf/moo

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2019/10/09/iterm2-critical... [2]: https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/162621/rxvt-2.7.0-rxvt...

mateo1• 4 years ago

I'm speechless. I never expected running curl could lead to such a security disaster.

daptaq5• 4 years ago

The terminal (or rather terminal emulation) is a mistake, people should stop glorifying it. It has no inherent value, beyond being able to run historical software that was bound to a terminal. Most of all one should stop confusing the terminal and the shell, which remains an interesting concept.

nickstinemates6• 4 years ago

`sudo curl | sh` to deploy my awesome service that definitely isn't a bitcoin miner, promise.

behnamoh8• 4 years ago

which begs the quotation: is there such a thing as a “firewall” for terminals?

my idea is to limit the terminal’s cpu usage so that any breach does not spread quickly in the system, and maybe limit the terminal’s network access, but leave the shell out of it. idk if the last part is possible.

texaslonghorn5• 4 years ago

Run it in a container?

dgl2• 4 years ago

I think that is probably excessive, a terminal is hardly as complex as a web browser.

screen or tmux (or even mosh) can essentially act as a terminal firewall, as they interpret escape sequences and maintain a virtual “screen”. Then you can sandbox their process in docker or similar.

Or if you want web browser style sandboxing maybe just using Xterm.js could work.

dredmorbius7• 4 years ago

ObLogicalFallaciesNit: It raises the question.

Begging the question is to answer the question with a premise that assumes the result. It's a form of circular reasoning.

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-begging-the-question-falla...

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/begging-t...

And to be clear, your question is a good one. It's just that it's raised and not begged. That said, I see and hear this all the time, including by historians of philosophy who are strongly familiar with logical fallacies and their distinctions.

xyzzy_plugh• 4 years ago

This is true of anything that ever renders to your terminal. I'm not sure this class of issue is worth worrying about, generally. Sure, these are neat and scary examples. Have you seen some of the recent GPU driver ACEs? Better not render any graphics!

A generalization of this is "receiving information from third parties can lead to security issues" which is of course true. Untrusted inputs are always untrusted.

Piping curl into bash is one thing, but this is on the level of "are you sure you want to open this file downloaded off the internet?" prompts of yore -- it's not productive.

spoils192• 4 years ago

Better not render any graphics!

Unironically a good idea. Graphics have always been a mistake - most engineers would agree that if we stuck with very basic output, our software would be in a much better place than today (and more usable, too!)

treve• 4 years ago

Completely agree, but also I remember that 'piping curl into bash' was always one of the biggest no-no's. I held onto this for so long, but then realized every time I run 'npm i' arbitrary commands can also run, and now it seems wild that I ever cared about curl | bash on websites that I trust

thehappypm• 4 years ago

Is curl unsafe? This is a pretty basic invocation of curl, no fancy flags needed.

tlamponi2• 4 years ago

No it isn't, or it's at least not the problematic part. curl is just the messenger, and on outputting things to a terminal you can use escape codes, and other things, to do some funky stuff like changing colors or making text blink.

If the terminal has a bug w.r.t. something it processes one could leverage that, but they'd probably need to know which terminal and maybe even which shell you're using; so maybe don't let curl/wget but also `cat` of a downloaded file output directly to the terminal if it isn't a trusted origin or if it looks/feels shady.

junon2• 4 years ago

Curl isn't the problem they're describing. The remote can assume you're running it in a terminal (especially since the user agent string indicates you're using curl) and can send malicious escape sequences in the body, which will be interpreted by your terminal emulator in most cases.

This is true of any program that prints output directly from a remote host / untrusted source.

In the event your terminal emulator has a vulnerability or allows you to run arbitrary commands (this is a feature of some emulators), the site can target that functionality for users of that emulator and wreak havoc.

I maintain a lot of ANSI escape related code. These exploits have always been theorized, but I've not once heard about this being exploited in the wild. It's certainly possible. Not very probable. Refer to your threat model, as always.

usr11063• 4 years ago

If you have a vulnerable terminal emulator, yes. Well, the same holds for every web site you visit if you have a vulnerable browser.

usr11063• 4 years ago

Unless there were an escape sequence meaning "execute this". I am not aware such beast would exist.

buzzdenver2• 4 years ago

I get "Weather report: not found" on the first line and then a 3 day forecast for idk what location.

igor_chubin3• 4 years ago

try `curl wttr.in/Munich` (with your location specified instead of Munich)

buzzdenver2• 4 years ago

Thanks. The odd thing is that the weather report looks somewhat accurate. I'm not behind any proxy. Let me know if I can help debug.

cercatrova5• 4 years ago

More cool console services like this one: https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services

  curl wttr.in/Moon

Shows moon phases

  curl rate.sx

Shows cryptocurrency exchange rates, from the same author as wttr.in

I sourced the above commands from a previous HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23646953

nickstinemates6• 4 years ago

rate.sx is very good. much better than all of the desktop client trackers out there and the web ones with too much granularity. sometimes i don't want to see the candles i just want to see the price of a particular coin

tonto• 4 years ago

A very fun way to have this, tmux status bar weather! `set -g status-left '#(curl "wttr.in/YourTown?u&format=3")'`. This way you can always see the latest :)

every• 4 years ago

I simply use the ansiweather app [0] through an alias in the terminal...

[0] https://github.com/fcambus/ansiweather

nooyurrsdey• 4 years ago

Only HN can be so critical of what is a really cool project.

Honestly this is a great _simple_ way to access weather without leaving my terminal. Love the basic ASCII graphics.

I noticed it's a LOT faster when I provide the city, probably because it doesn't have to look it up from IP:

``` curl wttr.in/atlanta ```

Nice work.

NmAmDa• 4 years ago

People on HN should he normally worried about running 'curl' from any untrustworthy sources because that is a security issue.

An example -https://www.onsecurity.io/blog/careless-with-curl-dont-be/ -

galenguyer• 4 years ago

This talks about concerns with piping curl into bash. It doesn't address any issues with just curling arbitrary data

mekster• 4 years ago

It's just cool but practically I never check weather until I'm about to leave home and then I'll just check a local weather app on my phone which should give more accurate and detailed info than a service that covers the entire world with presumably varying degree of accuracy.

nickstinemates6• 4 years ago

but imagine if you're in a bunker hacking on your fav project, no artificial light and you wonder.. shall i go to the surface? you curl this website and, if tolerable weather conditions, you plan your ascent.

aftbit2• 4 years ago

In the USA, I like the National Weather Service direct APIs. I wish I could get more granular forecast data, both in time and space, but they forecast dewpoint/humidity, which is really nice.

dredmorbius7• 4 years ago

Any links on that?

I wrote a set of scripts --- it takes thee, a bash function, sed, and awk --- to parse the dumped formatted HTML to a more usable form on a terminal.

Raw APIs might be more convenient / less complicated.

hoppyhoppy2• 4 years ago

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

aftbit2• 4 years ago

Yes, I am using a handful of different APIs. My full terminal weather setup deserves its own blog post... but until then, here are some zsh snippets, scripts, and curls to get you started.

Rough weather information for next days and hours:

    # Find zone with curl https://api.weather.gov/points/40.5878,-103.0694
    ZONE=${ZONE:-CAZ508}
    echo "Forecast for zone $ZONE"
    curl -s -A MyWeather/1.0 https://api.weather.gov/zones/forecast/$ZONE/forecast \
        | jq -r '.properties.periods[] | [.name, .detailedForecast] | join("\t")' \
        | column -t -s $'\t'

    # Find grid with same curl
    GRID=${GRID:-MTR/93,131}
    echo ""
    echo "Next 24 hours for grid $GRID"
    curl -s -A MyWeather/1.0 https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/$GRID/forecast/hourly \
        | jq --arg date $(date -Is) -r '.properties.periods[] | select(.startTime >= $date) | [(.startTime), ((.temperature|tostring) + " " + .temperatureUnit), (.windSpeed + " @ " + .windDirection), .shortForecast] | join("\t")' \
        | column -t -s $'\t' \
        | head -n 24

Weather discussion script (also using regexps to parse HTML):

https://gist.github.com/lachesis/6c7e5020b112fe8d7bcc83d99da...

Some docs on the "DWML rest API" that provides the dewpoint/humidity forecasts that I mentioned earlier:

https://graphical.weather.gov/xml/rest.php

https://graphical.weather.gov/xml/DWMLgen/schema/latest_DWML...

https://graphical.weather.gov/xml/docs/elementInputNames.php

Here's the script I use to access that API but it is still under active development and is pretty tailored for my situation. Please forgive jankiness. Give it LAT / LNG environment variables.

https://gist.github.com/lachesis/480a1811c75999205cb17a119b4...

Bonus points, for CA fire season, here's a script that shows PM2.5 for AirNow stations near a certain LAT/LNG:

https://gist.github.com/lachesis/a47212c848430e16e7d1ec6d855...

smegsicle2• 4 years ago

dewpoint is underrated

https://www.weather.gov/arx/why_dewpoint_vs_humidity

less than or equal to 55: dry and comfortable
between 55 and 65: becoming "sticky" with muggy evenings
greater than or equal to 65: lots of moisture in the air, becoming oppressive

brewdad3• 4 years ago

Where I live dew point gives a very strong indicator of our overnight low temperatures, especially in winter. Looking at dew point can tell me whether to expect frost or not and if black ice is likely to be an issue in the morning.

But yeah, treating those guidelines as anything other than a loose suggestion is meaningless.

simlan• 4 years ago

Love it. Was expecting maybe one limited end-point and was scrolling 5mins through all the features. Very cool

granddave• 4 years ago

This is a really nice service and I have used it for quite some time. Just a small reminder; to relieve the wttr servers, please cache the results on disk if you for example want to have a higher refresh rate on your tmux status bar.

See my dotfiles repo [1] if you're interested in such implementation

[1] https://github.com/Granddave/dotfiles/tree/master/tmux

agumonkey• 4 years ago

I wonder how far you could push the web into this mode.

Everything in tiny ascii strips. Even shopping, or other needs. A challenge in cute minimalism (not crippled).

Kim_Bruning4• 4 years ago

so the obvious (for me) thing to try was:

watch -n 600 -c 'curl -s v2.wttr.in/'

This ALMOST works, but somehow it messes up the formatting for me. For some reason watch doesn't pass through formatting cleanly or so?

igor_chubin3• 4 years ago

This is not a problem with wttr.in, this is a problem of `watch`. It is a known issue: it can't render ANSI output.

You can try to run it with any command that has ANSI output, and you will see it.

As a simple alternative, you write your own 'watch' like this:

while true; do curl -s wttr.in; sleep 60; clear; done

teddyh3• 4 years ago

When writing these things, I prefer using the “sleep” command as the while condition. This way, the loop is easier to break out of. I.e. when I press Ctrl-C, the sleep command returns a non-zero exit code, and the while loop terminates gracefully:

  while sleep 60; do clear; curl -s wttr.in; done

Otherwise, I very often get a loop which stubbornly refuses to abort, and I have to hammer both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-\ to make it stop. The downside is, of course, that I have to wait 60 seconds (in this case) the first time. When this is a problem, I just unroll the loop slightly and add an extra invocation to the beginning:

  clear; curl -s wttr.in; while sleep 60; do clear; curl -s wttr.in; done

This could be generalized into a terminal watch function:

  termwatch(){ delay="$1"; shift; clear; "$@"; while sleep "$delay"; do clear; "$@"; done; }

  termwatch 60 curl -s wttr.in

sigg3• 4 years ago

I'm going to add that if you live in Norway, YR has nice weather data available for free (required by law). Shameless plug for my little CLI tool when I was beginning to learn go:

https://github.com/sigg3/weather_query/

nickstinemates6• 4 years ago

this is really nice, i like the rendering and simplicity. it's aesthetically pleasing. overall 10/10 experience.

nickjj• 4 years ago

I've had this shell function / alias set up for years:

    weather () {
        curl "https://wttr.in/${1}"
    }

This lets you run: weather nyc, a zip code and everything else wttr.in supports.

secondcoming• 4 years ago

That is very lovely. Well done!

shdon• 4 years ago

I'm a little amused by its weather report classifying the night as "Sunny", when it probably just means the sky will be clear.

netsharc• 4 years ago

Seems like it breaks when it can't find the geo-location, it says "Weather report: not found" but still shows the weather forecast from... somewhere?

anovikov• 4 years ago

cool widget but sucks on a mac where default background is white. yellow stuff is almost invisible.

queuebert3• 4 years ago

You can change the Terminal background on a Mac.

nixpulvis• 4 years ago

So I do a basic `curl wttr.in` and I get back a line "Weather report: not found" followed however, by what appears to be a full weather report. Two things:

1. Either give me an error and exit, or warn me about something meaningful 2. Show me the location of the weather report, as it stands I'm left guessing

Otherwise, it's nice to see people making simple text interfaces for important data like this.

yasenn• 4 years ago

Igor created several great cli projects like cheat.sh[1], late.nz[2], QRenco.de[3],rate.sx[4]

Also, he maintains the awesome-console-services[5] list

[1] https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh

[2] https://github.com/chubin/late.nz

[3] https://github.com/chubin/qrenco.de

[4] https://github.com/chubin/rate.sx

[5] https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services

pschastain• 4 years ago

A nice idea but it gives the wrong info for Spokane, WA, USA

nazka• 4 years ago

My little custom command (HN formatting break it all so need to be nicely formatted again).

alias weather=weather function weather() { if [ $# -le 2 ]; then Command="wttr.in/$1" if [ $# -eq 2 ]; then Command="$Command,$2" fi fi Command="curl ${Command// /%20}" eval $Command }

sylware• 4 years ago

interop done the right way: this guy is going to be in trouble with the web javascript kiddies.

Yes, if this guy is a state-sponsored computer security hacker, he could pown the 3, maybe 4, ppl (and I am one of them) using its http services via curl and our terminals or image format parsers or etc. Is this worth for that many ppl?

Anyways, that's too sexy, I am willing to take the bait.

That said, I could use an official/trusted online source for the weather information and format it myself (I guess I would get a CSV or json or xml file).

pesnk• 4 years ago

in ~ 2016 I built a plugin for on-my-fish to simplify the process of curling wttr.in https://github.com/oh-my-fish/plugin-wttr. From today I'm still using this plugin a lot. Checking out the weather on your terminal turns out to be faster than open a weather website or unlock my phone and check in out a weather app.

`curl wttr.in`: Weather in your terminal

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