@WeatherBot ☀️ ⚡ ☁️

A slack weather bot that reports the weather of a city of choice using the OpenWeatherMap API.

Getting Started

This bot is hosted on Heroku, which may take a while for the response ⌛ . Instructions for running this bot locally could be found below.

1. If bot is active, type in the bot followed by the city name: @Weather Bot (CITY-NAME)

   example: @Weather Bot San Francisco

2. The bot will report with the appropriate message.

To run bot locally

1. Clone this repository.
2. Create your own openweatherAPI_Key by creating a free account at openweatherma.
3. Create your Slack API Key.
4. Add in your new keys to your .bash_profile in your terminal.

       export SLACK_TOKEN='xoxb************';
       export OpenWeather_API_Key='644***********';
   
   

5. Install dependencies: npm install
6. Start running bot: npm start
7. Type in @Weather Bot (CITY-NAME) into a Slack channel with the city of choice.

Built With:

• Node.js
• Express
• Axios: Promise based HTTP client for the browser and node.js
• Slackbots

Design/Architecture & Improvements

• @Weather Bot covers basic weather report to the user
  • High and Low temperature of the day and description of the weather
• Bot looks for key words in description of weather, such as cloudy, to determine emojis and messages to send back to user
  • Can be improved by making messages more descriptive after more familiarity/research of weather conditions (ex. humidity, pressure, wind, etc) at different places.
• Deployed using Heroku
• Initially, I tried out Dialogflow to check out if natural language could be used to train the bot. This process covered more than what the basic weather bot intended.
• Configuration of secret tokens was something that needed to be thought out more.
  • Can look for ways to improve so users wouldn't have to create new tokens
  • Useful link from Heroku
  • Storing API keys

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgements and Resources

• Build a Slackbot: Useful youtube video to help get me started
• Learn How to Build Slack Bot Node.js: Blog with more details using node.js
• Deploying Slack Bots to Heroku
• Resolving crashes
• How to build a SlackBot