🌦️ Weather Update App

A Python automation that checks the current weather for your exact location and emails you an update — so you know whether to grab an umbrella or sunglasses before you even step outside.

Run it each morning and get today's weather condition delivered straight to your inbox, no app-checking required.

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🎮 Demo

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✨ Features

• 🌍 Location-based weather lookup — pulls live conditions for your latitude/longitude from the OpenWeatherMap API.
• ✉️ Automatic email delivery through Gmail's SMTP server with a secure TLS connection.
• 🔒 Secure configuration — API keys, Gmail credentials, and coordinates are all loaded from environment variables via python-dotenv, never hardcoded.
• 🛡️ Fail-loud API handling — raise_for_status() makes sure a failed API request stops the script instead of silently sending a bad email.
• 🕒 Schedule-friendly design — a single-run script that fits naturally into cron, Task Scheduler, GitHub Actions, or PythonAnywhere.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Category	Tool / Concept
Language	Python 3
API	OpenWeatherMap Current Weather API
HTTP Requests	requests
Email	smtplib (standard library) — SMTP + TLS email delivery
Secrets Management	python-dotenv
Core Concepts	REST API integration, JSON parsing, environment variables, email automation

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📂 Project Structure

Weather Update App/
│
├── main.py     # Entry point — fetches weather data and sends the email
├── .env         # Your API key, Gmail credentials, and coordinates (never committed)
└── README.md

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x installed
• A free OpenWeatherMap API key
• requests and python-dotenv — install via pip:

pip install requests python-dotenv

Setup

1. Create your .env file in the project root:

OWM_WEATHER_API_KEY=your_openweathermap_api_key
ZNA_LAT=your_latitude
ZNA_LONG=your_longitude
SMTP_GMAIL_ID=your_email@gmail.com
SMTP_GMAIL_PASSWORD=your_app_password

⚠️ Use a Gmail App Password, not your real Gmail password — Google blocks plain-password SMTP logins by default. Add .env to your .gitignore so it never gets pushed to GitHub.

Run it

python main.py

Automate it

Schedule the script to run once a day with any of these:

• Cron (macOS/Linux): 0 7 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /path/to/main.py — runs daily at 7 AM
• Task Scheduler (Windows): create a daily trigger pointing to the script
• GitHub Actions: use a schedule trigger to run it from GitHub's infrastructure
• PythonAnywhere: set up a free Scheduled Task to run it daily in the cloud

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🧩 How It Works

1. Loading Configuration Securely

All secrets and personal details are pulled from environment variables, keeping them out of the source code.

load_dotenv()

WEATHER_KEY= os.environ.get("OWM_WEATHER_API_KEY")
MY_LAT= os.environ.get("ZNA_LAT")
MY_LONG= os.environ.get("ZNA_LONG")
USER_ID = os.environ.get("SMTP_GMAIL_ID")
ID_PASSWORD = os.environ.get("SMTP_GMAIL_PASSWORD")
API_END_POINT = "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather"

2. Fetching Today's Weather

The script sends your coordinates and API key to OpenWeatherMap, then extracts the main weather condition (e.g. Clear, Clouds, Rain) from the JSON response.

parameters = {
    "lat": MY_LAT,
    "lon": MY_LONG,
    "appid": WEATHER_KEY,
}

response = requests.get(API_END_POINT, params=parameters)
response.raise_for_status()
weather_data = response.json()

today_weather = weather_data["weather"][0]["main"]

3. Sending the Email Update

The weather condition is dropped into a message and sent through Gmail's SMTP server over a secure TLS connection.

MESSAGE = f"Subject: Weather Update!\n\n{today_weather} today."

with smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com") as connection:
    connection.starttls()
    connection.login(user=USER_ID, password=ID_PASSWORD)
    connection.sendmail(
        from_addr=USER_ID,
        to_addrs=USER_ID,
        msg=MESSAGE.encode("utf-8"),
    )
    print("Update sent successfully.")

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📚 What This Project Demonstrates

• Consuming a third-party REST API with query parameters and API-key authentication
• Navigating nested JSON responses to extract the exact field needed
• Sending automated emails programmatically with smtplib and TLS
• Managing secrets and configuration with environment variables
• Building a script designed to run unattended on a schedule

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🔮 Future Improvements

• Add an optional alert mode — only send an email when conditions are worth flagging (e.g. rain or snow), instead of on every run
• Use the forecast endpoint so the email covers the whole day, not just the current moment
• Include richer details in the message: temperature, city name, and humidity
• Convert temperature units (the API returns Kelvin by default unless units is specified)
• Add logging and a dry-run mode for safe testing

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👤 Developer

VISHAL YADAV

• GitHub: @VISHAL108-Mech
• LinkedIn: vishal-yadav-2a91a7428
• Email: vy4122000@gmail.com