Weather Monitoring System

Overview

This Weather Monitoring System is a full-stack application that fetches real-time weather data for multiple cities, calculates daily summaries, and provides alerting capabilities based on user-defined thresholds.

Features

• Real-time weather data fetching for multiple cities
• Daily weather summaries including average, maximum, and minimum temperatures
• User-configurable weather alerts
• RESTful API for weather data and alerts
• Frontend dashboard for data visualization

Tech Stack

• Backend: Node.js with Express.js
• Frontend: React.js
• Database: MongoDB

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have met the following requirements:

• Node.js (v14 or later)
• npm (v6 or later)
• MongoDB (v4 or later)
• An OpenWeatherMap API key

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone [https://github.com/your-username/weather-monitoring-system.git](https://github.com/your-username/weather-monitoring-system.git)
cd weather-monitoring-system

2. Install backend dependencies:

npm install

3. Install frontend dependencies:

cd ./frontend
npm install

4. Create a .env file in the project directory with the following content:

MONGODB_URI=your_mongodb_connection_string
OPENWEATHERMAP_API_KEY=your_openweathermap_api_key
PORT=5000
MAIL_ID=your_email_id
APP_PASS=your_email_app_password

5. Create another .env file in ./frontend directory with content:

VITE_API_BASE_URL= your_backend_url (http://localhost:5000)

Running the Application

1. Start the backend server:

npm start

2. In a new terminal, start the frontend development server:

cd frontend
npm start

3. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000 to view the application.

API Endpoints

• GET /api/weather/:city - Get current weather for a city
• GET /api/summary/:city - Get daily summary for a city
• GET /api/summaries/:city - Get all summaries for a city
• POST /api/setAlert - Set a new weather alert

Design Choices

1. Microservice Architecture: The application is divided into backend and frontend services, allowing for independent scaling and maintenance.

2. RESTful API: The backend exposes a RESTful API, making it easy to integrate with various frontend frameworks or mobile applications in the future.

3. Cron Jobs: We use node-cron to schedule periodic weather data fetching, ensuring our database is always up-to-date without overwhelming the OpenWeatherMap API.

4. MongoDB: Chosen for its flexibility with document-based storage, which is ideal for storing varying weather data structures.

5. React Hooks: The frontend extensively uses React Hooks for state management and side effects, promoting cleaner and more maintainable code.

6. Error Handling: Comprehensive error handling is implemented both in the backend and frontend to provide informative feedback to users.

7. Email Notifications: Nodemailer is used to send email alerts when user-defined weather thresholds are breached.

UI

Dependencies

Backend Dependencies

• express: Web application framework
• mongoose: MongoDB object modeling tool
• node-cron: Task scheduler in Node.js
• axios: Promise based HTTP client
• nodemailer: Send emails from Node.js
• dotenv: Loads environment variables from .env file
• cors: Enable CORS with various options

Frontend Dependencies

• react: JavaScript library for building user interfaces
• react-dom: React package for working with the DOM
• axios: Promise based HTTP client
• chart.js: JavaScript charting library
• react-chartjs-2: React wrapper for Chart.js