Add Weather Data With Caching To Neofetch

• Adam Douglas

• Published Nov 24, 2021
• Revised Jul 30, 2023

• technology
• #100DaysToOffload #BASH #commandline

The popular and powerful command-line system information BASH script “Neofetch” seems to be everywhere yet for some reason I’ve never used it nor any other variants available today. So I decided one day to play with Neofetch to see what I could do with it. For the most part I’ve kept with what is built in, but I wanted to display weather data by limiting the impact of Neofetch’s load time and not wasting unnecessary bandwidth. You see most weather data providers that I know of only update the forecast weather data every hour. Therefore, I figured I could cache the weather data to avoid fetching weather data every time Neofetch is run.

Environment

Tested with the following…

• Arch Linux x86_64
• curl v7.80.0
• Fish v3.3.1
• GNU bash v5.1.8
• Neofetch v7.1.0

Fetching Weather Data

I first began playing around with obtaining the weather data with cURL using the service wttr.in and shortly figured out how to do a simple one-line output as I desired.

$ curl -s "https://wttr.in/Example?format=%l:+%t+(%f)+%c+%C+%w+%h+%T"
Example: +22°C (+25°C) ☁️ Smoke →7km/h 88% 02:19:37+0500

%l    Location name
%t    Temperature (actual)
%f    Temperature (feels like)
%c    Weather condition
%C    Weather condition textual name
%w    Wind
%h    Humidity
%T    Current time

Script

With fetching weather data figured out I then moved on to learning how I would implement this into Neofetch’s configuration file. The configuration file by default is located at “~/.config/neofetch/config.conf”. Looking at the configuration file I soon noticed that this file is written in BASH and is imported into Neofetch’s BASH script using the built-in command “.” (source). So after some testing I quickly came up with the below BASH script code.

getWeather() {
    weather_params="Example?format=%l:+%t+(%f)+%c+%C+%w+%h+%T"
    data_path="$HOME/.config/neofetch/data-weather.txt"
    duration=3600

    if [[ -e "$data_path" ]]; then
        weather_date="$(stat -c '%Y' $data_path)"
        current_date="$(date +%s)"
        date_diff=$(($current_date - $weather_date))

        if [ $date_diff -ge $duration ]; then
            getWeatherData
            setWeatherData
        else
            setWeatherData
        fi
    else
        getWeatherData
        setWeatherData
    fi

    showWeatherData
}
getWeatherData() {
    curl -s "https://wttr.in/$weather_params" > "$data_path"
}
setWeatherData() {
    weather_data="$(cat $data_path)"
}
showWeatherData() {
    prin "Weather" "$weather_data"
}

The settings are easily controlled by alternating 3 variables.

weather_params

wttr.in parameters.

Variable value should be enclosed in double quotes.

data_path

The output weather data directory and filename.

Variable value should be enclosed in double quotes.

duration

Interval to fetch weather data.

Represents a measurement in seconds (integer).

Do not enclose the variable value in quotes.

Example Output

Neofetch Config File

Here the complete setup done within the Neofetch configuration file “~/.config/neofetch/config.conf”.

print_info() {
    info title
    info underline
    info "OS" distro
    info "Host" model
    info "Kernel" kernel
    info "Uptime" uptime
    info "Packages" packages
    info "Shell" shell
    info "Resolution" resolution
    info "DE" de
    info "WM" wm
    info "WM Theme" wm_theme
    info "Theme" theme
    info "Icons" icons
    info "Terminal" term
    info "Terminal Font" term_font
    info "CPU" cpu
    info "GPU" gpu
    info "Memory" memory
    info "GPU Driver" gpu_driver  # Linux/macOS only
    info "CPU Usage" cpu_usage
    info "Disk" disk
    info "Local IP" local_ip
    info "Public IP" public_ip
    info "Locale" locale  # This only works on glibc systems.
    getWeather
    info cols
}
getWeather() {
    weather_params="Example?format=%l:+%t+(%f)+%c+%C+%w+%h+%T"
    data_path="$HOME/.config/neofetch/data-weather.txt"
    duration=3600

    if [[ -e "$data_path" ]]; then
        weather_date="$(stat -c '%Y' $data_path)"
        current_date="$(date +%s)"
        date_diff=$(($current_date - $weather_date))

        if [ $date_diff -ge $duration ]; then
            getWeatherData
            setWeatherData
        else
            setWeatherData
        fi
    else
        getWeatherData
        setWeatherData
    fi

    showWeatherData
}
getWeatherData() {
    curl -s "https://wttr.in/$weather_params" > "$data_path"
}
setWeatherData() {
    weather_data="$(cat $data_path)"
}
showWeatherData() {
    prin "Weather" "$weather_data"
}

title_fqdn="off"
kernel_shorthand="on"
distro_shorthand="off"
os_arch="on"
uptime_shorthand="on"
memory_percent="on"
memory_unit="gib"
package_managers="on"
shell_path="off"
shell_version="on"
speed_type="bios_limit"
speed_shorthand="off"
cpu_brand="on"
cpu_speed="on"
cpu_cores="logical"
cpu_temp="off"
gpu_brand="on"
gpu_type="all"
refresh_rate="on"
gtk_shorthand="off"
gtk2="on"
gtk3="on"
public_ip_host="https://ident.me"
public_ip_timeout=2
de_version="on"
disk_show=('/' '/boot' '/home' '/srv' '/mnt/data')
disk_subtitle="mount"
disk_percent="on"
music_player="auto"
song_format="%artist% - %album% - %title%"
song_shorthand="off"
mpc_args=()
colors=(distro)
bold="on"
underline_enabled="on"
underline_char="-"
separator=":"
block_range=(0 15)
color_blocks="on"
block_width=3
block_height=1
col_offset="auto"
bar_char_elapsed="-"
bar_char_total="="
bar_border="on"
bar_length=15
bar_color_elapsed="distro"
bar_color_total="distro"
cpu_display="off"
memory_display="off"
battery_display="off"
disk_display="off"
image_backend="kitty"
image_source="ascii"
ascii_distro="auto"
ascii_colors=(distro)
ascii_bold="on"
image_loop="off"
thumbnail_dir="${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-${HOME}/.cache}/thumbnails/neofetch"
crop_mode="normal"
crop_offset="center"
image_size="auto"
gap=3
yoffset=0
xoffset=0
background_color=
stdout="off"

Tip for BASH

Call Neofetch each time a terminal/console is started by adding the command "neofetch" without double quotes to "~/.bashrc".

Tip for FiSH

Call Neofetch each time a terminal/console is started by adding the command "neofetch" without double quotes to "~/.config/fish/config.fish".

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting 100DaysToOffload.com.

References

• bandwidth, Wikipedia
• Bash (Unix Shell), Wikipedia
• curl
• cURL, Wikipedia
• GNU Bash
• Neofetch, GitHub
• wttr.in, GitHub

Changelog

• Nov 25, 2021
  • change topic from linux to neofetch
• Jan 20, 2022
  • adjust title for clarity
  • adjust description for clarity
  • add old link redirection
• May 4, 2022
  • Fix link to use https
• Dec 19, 2022
  • change topic
  • remove tags cache, weather
• Jan 4, 2023
  • change topic
• Jul 30, 2023
  • fix meta description too short
  • fix punctuation and grammar

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