Weather Application

This application uses a 3rd party weather API to display tabulated weather forecasts in an interactive React website, and automatically generate weather reports.

Table Of Contents

• Technologies
• Console Commands
• Requirements
• Setup & Installation
• Job System
• Assumptions
• Design Decisions
• Improvements
• Demonstration

Technologies

• React
• Laravel
• TailwindCSS
• Daisy UI

Console Commands

The following commands can be used in the console to perform actions:

COMMAND	USAGE	DESCRIPTION
forecast {cities}	php artisan forecast {cities}	Get weather forcast for the specified city or cities
city:add {city}	php artisan city:add {city}	Add a reported city. Reported cities are included in daily automatic reporting.
city:remove {city}	php artisan city:remove {city}	Remove a reported city. Reported cities are included in daily automatic reporting.
city:list	php artisan city:list	List reported cities. Reported cities are included in daily automatic reporting.

Requirements

• Node.JS
• PHP
• Composer

Setup & Installation

1. Clone the repository onto your machine.
2. Create a MySQL database schema on your machine for the project. Keep the details handy.
3. Sign up to WeatherBit and get a free tier API key.
4. Complete the following steps within the /src/ folder of the cloned repository.
5. Copy the contents of .env.example to .env and configure the database values and add your WeatherBit api key.
6. Install composer packages with composer install
7. Install NPM packages using npm install
8. Generate the Laravel application key using php artisan key:generate.
9. Run database migrations using php artisan migrate:fresh.
10. Start the development server using npm run dev.
11. In another terminal, serve the web application with php artisan serve.
12. Access and interact with the website using the url.

Job System

For daily automated weather forecasts, there is a DailyReportJob which runs daily. Follow the instructions below to get this running:

1. Complete the following steps within the /src/ folder of the cloned repository.
2. Start the queue worker with php artisan queue:work.
3. In another terminal, start the scheduler with php artisan schedule:work.

Assumptions

• Commands are required to specifiy which cities are included in daily reports.
• A daily report is just a Report record in the database that has many DayForecast records.
• Daily reports do not need to be accessible by end users.

Design Decisions

• WeatherBit API was chosen as it offers a generous free tier, and has a suitable endpoint for interpretable weather forecasting.
• DaisyUI was chosen as a TailwindCSS component library for the project to save time developing a simple frontend.
• A spinner displays when loading data so the user has knowledge that their request is being served.
• ReactJS was used for the frontend. A limited amount of components were created so the project didn't become unnecessarily complicated.
• A class WeatherBitApi was created to interact with the WeatherBit API. This was done so functionality can be expanded in future should the need arise.
• An environment variable WEATHERBIT_API_KEY was added to the .env file, because it's a good idea to keep keys out of version control ;).

Improvements

• Add improved error handling.
• Remove unused models and migrations provided by Laravel.
• Add response body to unsuccessful API requests.
• Support city names that contain a space in the console commands i.e. "Gold Coast"
• Add check to see if city is actually a city, instead of regex.

Demonstration

Website

Forecast Table

Bad Input

Add City

List Cities