README.md

README: get-weather 🌞

get-weather is a small program written in the Zig programming language intended to be used as a custom Waybar module. It requires you to have a API key from OpenWeatherMap (don't worry it's free), and it requires the API key to be available as an environment variable called OPEN_WEATHER_MAP_API_KEY at runtime. Program takes 2 arguments latitude and longitude.

Example Waybar config for get-weather

  "custom/weather": {
    "exec": "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/waybar/get-weather 40.73 -73.93",
    "return-type": "json",
    "format": "{}",
    "tooltip": true,
    "interval": 3600
  },

You can test get-weather by running it in a terminal:

$ ~/.config/waybar/get-weather 40.73 -73.93
{"text":"🌞 +13.7°C", "tooltip":"Long Island City: 🌞 clear sky 🌡️+13.7°C  🌬️ 2.6m/s"}

Build instructions

Take a look at the Zig download page for instructions. Then just clone this repository, and run zig build. (If the size of the executable matters to you; e.g if you plan on adding it to a dotfiles repository together with you Waybar config, you can run zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSmall, and the size of the executable will be only ~150K.) Copy the get-weather executable from zig-out/bin/get-weather to e.g your waybar config folder like in the example above, and you're all set.

Why Zig

My weather module at the time used wttr.in, but it wasn't very accurate for the place I live. I wanted to try Zig, and this seemed like a nice first project. I needed to implement a HTTP GET call, perform JSON parsing, and handle other frequently required tasks. Once started it also gave me a little bonus. I first implemented the API call by using the http module from the Zig standard library, but then found out that the module only supports TLS1.3, and the OpenWeatherMap API uses TLS1.2, so that didn't work. I then decided to use libcurl, which meant I also got to try using C libraries with my Zig code. Very cool!