Amazing Forecast Tracker 🌧️ 🌞

This application can:

• Monitor the 3-day forecast for a location given by latitude and longitude.
• Return the minumum and maximum recorded temperature for a given location and hour.

How to Install

Pre-Requisites:

• Docker

We will run the app using Docker Compose, which makes it very easy to get started without having to install any extra dependencies.

Step 1: Build the docker image

docker build . -t weather-app:latest

Step 2: Update environment variables

• Open deploy/docker-compose.yaml
• Replace the environment variable POSTGRES_PASSWORD with another password 🤫
• Update any of the following variables to update application settings:

Warning: I would not recommend changing VERSION, PG_HOST, or WEATHER_API_URL because it could cause issues in the application.

name	description	example
LATITUDE	latitude of location to monitor	39.1031
LONGITUDE	longitude of location to monitor	-39.1031
INTERVAL	interval to pull forecast data (in minutes)	60
DAYS_AHEAD	number of days to look ahead for forecast data (weather API only can pull 7)	3
PG_USERNAME	username for postgres db	postgres_username
PG_PASSWORD	password for postgres db	postgres_password

Step 3. Run Docker Compose.

docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yaml up

You should see some Postgres + FastAPI logs in the console along with the final success message "Application startup complete." If you see any errors in the console, the application may not have started correctly.

Step 4: Explore the application

You can find swagger documentation at http://localhost:8000/api/docs

You can try:

• Configuring different latitude and longitudes to load data for multiple locations
• Configuring different intervals and explore how often the forecast changes
• Trying out the API to find the min and max temperatures recorded for a location

Step 5: Stop the application

You can stop the application by running:

docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yaml stop

You can also run the following to stop the application and remove all services:

docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yaml down

Assumptions:

While developing this application I came across a few unknowns. I took the following assumptions:

Related To	Assumption
Requirement #3	By next 72 hours I assume that is inclusive to the current hour as well as the end hour. For example, if it is 10:30 currently, we get data for 10:00 today, as well as for 10:00 on the 3rd day. 10:00 on the 3rd day would be the last hour we get data for.
Requirement #6	We should only have one container that runs the application. If I were implementing this in real life I would likely have 1 container for the API and another container for the forecast data pull, but for the sake of the exercise I ran them as one app.
Requirement #1	The app only needs to monitor one location. In the full system, multiple locations would be monitored.
Requirement #5	By highest/lowest recorded forcast, this means we need to return the highest and lowest forecast in the database for the specified location, day and hour of day that was recorded.
Weather API Response	I assumed all units coming from the Weather API would be in Fahrenheit, but this might not always be the case