Will it be a White Christmas?

All the crooning songs are demanding snow, and you want to know whether today will be the day it happens. Find the answer with today’s Advent Calendar app:

https://willitsnowtoday.com

Of course, it’s built with nothing but Python!

Our app looks up the weather based on your location. Sadly for us, the Anvil office is in the south of England, which means:

Here’s how it works:

Anvil works out the approximate location of every visitor to your app from their internet (IP) address. This information is available in your code at anvil.server.context.client.location (see the docs) – including an approximate latitude and longitude.

Then, it’s just a matter of getting a weather forecast API – and Dark Sky’s API is perfect for that! You’ll need to get an API key, but it only takes 2 minutes to sign up, and it’s free up to 1,000 requests per day.

@anvil.server.callable
def will_it_snow_here():
  location = anvil.server.context.client.location
  darksky_key = anvil.secrets.get_secret('darksky_key')
  r = anvil.http.request(f"https://api.darksky.net/forecast/{darksky_key}/{location.latitude},{location.longitude}",
                         json=True)
  it_will_snow = (r['daily'][0].get("precipType") == "snow")
  
  return it_will_snow, f"{location.city or location.subdivision}, {location.country}"

And now, we just need to build a Python UI! We get the forecast and the location from the server, and we use that to select which message to show (“yes” or “no”):

See the Source

Check out the source code for yourself!