GeoWeather is a Node.js web application that uses HTML5 geolocation and the OpenWeatherMap API to display the weather at your current location. It uses the Material Design Lite library to display the weather in a minimal, yet effective manner, and jQuery to do CSS manipulations and AJAX calls.
GeoWeather uses a few open-source libraries to function properly:
- Node.js - Evented I/O for the backend
- Express - Fast, minimalist web framework for Node.js
- cssnano, UglifyJS - Minifiers for CSS and JavaScript
- request - Simplified HTTP request client for Node.js
- Pug - High performance templating engine (formerly known as Jade)
- Material Design Lite - Adds a Material Design look and feel to static websites and does not rely on JavaScript frameworks or libraries
- jQuery - Makes HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and AJAX much simpler
- Weather Icons - Icon font with weather themed icons that allows for easy usage with the OpenWeatherMap API
GeoWeather was built on Node.js v4 but has not been used on previous versions to test for backwards-compatibility with them.
To ensure a minimal chance of encountering bugs, please download and extract the latest pre-built release from here
Next, in order for this application to use the OpenWeatherMap API, you will need to get an API key from here.
Once you have gotten your API key, download the latest version as a zip file from here or clone the repository using Git:
$ git clone https://github.com/silverAndroid/current-weather.git
Then, install the dependencies and start the server:
$ cd current-weather
$ npm install
$ API_KEY=<openweather_api_key> node ./bin/www
You can now access the web app by going to http://localhost:3000. If you want to change the port being used, just add PORT=<port_number>
before running the node
command, ie.
$ API_KEY=<openweather_api_key> PORT=<port_number> node ./bin/www
If you want to access the web app from another device, download and install ngrok, a binary that allows you to securely access the web app running locally on your device (it supports 32-bit and 64-bit Mac OS X, Windows, Linux (also supports ARM on Linux), and FreeBSD), run the binary while specifying the port number, and it will show you a URL to access the web app with:
$ cd /path/to/where/you/installed/ngrok
$ ./ngrok http <port_app_running_on>
and if it was successful, you should see something similar to this:
NOTE: Please use the HTTPS URL on Google Chrome because it only allows using geolocation on secure origins, such as HTTPS.