Forecast.io Wrapper

This is a wrapper for the forecast.io API. It allows you to get the weather for any location, now, in the past, or future.

I was originally looking for a good python weather API to use in another project. When I struggled to find anything I liked, I decided to write this one.

The Basic Use section covers enough to get you going. I suggest also reading the source if you want to know more about how to use the wrapper or what its doing (it's very simple).

Recent Changes

• python-forecastio is now available on PyPI.
• Requests is now used for HTTP/S requests. The main advantages are HTTPS support and GZip compression
• Updates to the way load_forecast is used. This should make it easier to keep track of the state of your Forecast objects.

Installation

You can now use pip to install python-forecastio. To install pip install python-forecastio to remove pip uninstall python-forecastio

If you choose to install python-forecastio manually, it depends on the requests library (http://docs.python-requests.org)

Requirements

• You need an API key to use it (http://developer.forecast.io). Don't worry a key is free.

Basic Use

Although you don't need to know anything about the forecast.io API to use this module, their docs are available at http://developer.forecast.io

To use the wrapper:

import forecastio

api_key = "YOUR API KEY"
lat = -31.967819
lng = 115.87718

forecast = forecastio.load_forecast(api_key, lat, lng)
...

The load_forecast() method has a few optional parameters. Providing your API key, a latitude and longitude are the only required parameters.

Use the forecast.DataBlockType() eg. currently(), daily(), hourly(), minutely() methods to load the data you are after.

These methods return a DataBlock. Except currently() which returns a DataPoint.

byHour = forecast.hourly()
print byHour.summary
print byHour.icon

The .data attributes for each DataBlock is a list of DataPoint objects. This is where all the good data is :)

for hourlyData in byHour.data:
        print hourlyData.temperature

Advanced

forecastio.load_forecast(key, latitude, longitude)

This makes an API request and returns a Forecast object (see below).

Parameters:

• key - Your API key from https://developer.forecast.io/
• latitude - The latitude of the location for the forecast
• longitude - The longitude of the location for the forecast
• time - (optional) A datetime object for the forecast either in the past or future
• units - (optional) A string of the preferred units of measurement, "auto" is the default. "us","ca","uk","si" are also available. See the API Docs https://developer.forecast.io/docs/v2 for exactly what each unit means.
• lazy - (optional) Defaults to false. If true the function will request the json data as it is needed. Results in more requests, but maybe a faster response time.
• callback - (optional) Pass a function to be used as a callback. If used, load_forecast() will use an asynchronous HTTP call and will not return the forecast object directly, instead it will be passed to the callback function. Make sure it can accept it.

---

class forecastio.models.Forecast

The Forecast object, it contains both weather data and the HTTP response from forecast.io

Attributes

• response

  • The Response object returned from requests request.get() method. See https://requests.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/#requests.Response

• http_headers

  • A dictionary of response headers. 'X-Forecast-API-Calls' might be of interest, it contains the number of API calls made by the given API key for today.

• json

  • A dictionary containing the json data returned from the API call.

Methods

• currently()

  • Returns a ForecastioDataPoint object

• minutely()

  • Returns a ForecastioDataBlock object

• hourly()

  • Returns a ForecastioDataBlock object

• daily()

  • Returns a ForecastioDataBlock object

• update()

  • Refreshes the forecast data by making a new request.

---

class forecastio.models.ForecastioDataBlock

Contains data about a forecast over time.

Attributes (descriptions taken from the forecast.io website)

• summary

  • A human-readable text summary of this data block.

• icon

  • A machine-readable text summary of this data block.

• data

  • An array of ForecastioDataPoint objects (see below), ordered by time, which together describe the weather conditions at the requested location over time.

---

class forecastio.models.ForecastioDataPoint

Contains data about a forecast at a particular time.

Data points have many attributes, but not all of them are always available. Some commonly used ones are:

Attributes (descriptions taken from the forecast.io website)

• summary - A human-readable text summary of this data block.
• icon - A machine-readable text summary of this data block.
• time - The time at which this data point occurs.
• temperature - (not defined on daily data points): A numerical value representing the temperature at the given time.
• precipProbability - A numerical value between 0 and 1 (inclusive) representing the probability of precipitation occurring at the given time.

For a full list of ForecastioDataPoint attributes and attribute descriptions, take a look at the forecast.io data point documentation (https://developer.forecast.io/docs/v2#data-points)