In Using the Open Weather Map API with curl we saw how to fetch the weather using curl. Now we are going to use Python as that will make it easier to use this as part of a larger application. Before you read this article, make sure you read the one using curl.

Configuration file

It is better to store all API keys and passwords in separate configuration files that are usually not stored and distributed together with the source code. That gives a lot of flexibility.

So we create a file called config.ini with the following content: 

[openweathermap]
api=wkfhshoiaslv

Where of course I put the API-key from Open Weather Maps.

In the code we have the get_api_key function that uses the configparser standard library to read the INI file.

We also use the requests module to send the API request and then to convert the resulting JSON into a Python dictionary.

The code

examples/python/get_weather.py

import configparser
import requests
import sys

def get_api_key():
    config = configparser.ConfigParser()
    config.read('config.ini')
    return config['openweathermap']['api']

def get_weather(api_key, location):
    url = "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q={}&units=metric&appid={}".format(location, api_key)
    r = requests.get(url)
    return r.json()

def main():
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        exit("Usage: {} LOCATION".format(sys.argv[0]))
    location = sys.argv[1]

    api_key = get_api_key()
    weather = get_weather(api_key, location)

    print(weather['main']['temp'])
    print(weather)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

At the end we show how to access the individual temperature data and we also print the whole data structure: (I've changed the layout of the output to make it more readable.)

The dumped data

{
   'coord': {
       'lon': 19.04,
       'lat': 47.5
   },
   'weather': [{
        'id': 701,
        'main': 'Mist',
        'description': 'mist',
        'icon': '50n'
   }],
   'base': 'stations',
   'main': {
       'temp': 3,
       'pressure': 1016,
       'humidity': 89,
       'temp_min': 3,
       'temp_max': 3
   },
   'visibility': 5000,
   'wind': {
       'speed': 2.1, 
       'deg': 350
   },
   'clouds': {
       'all': 75
   },
   'dt': 1518195600,
   'sys': {
        'type': 1,
        'id': 5724,
        'message': 0.0023,
        'country': 'HU',
        'sunrise': 1518155884,
        'sunset': 1518191922
   },
   'id': 3054643,
   'name': 'Budapest',
   'cod': 200
}

Conclusion

Once we have this basic solution we can integrate this code into a larger application or change the requested URL to match other API end-points.