This repo hosts a pair of python scripts (using the beautiful soup library) to scrape place-specific, weather forecast information from the UK met office website.
As the owner of a Solar installation, I am interested in how likely it is for tomorrow to be either sunny or overcast where I live, as well as to be able to correlate historical weather forecasts against photo-voltaic energy produced.
Each script is run as GitHub action using time of day as the trigger.
The first script runs once a day and fetches the forecast for the following day.
The second script runs hourly during daylight to fetch the forecast for the current day and update if different from the original forecast.
The output of the scripts is a SQL batch file that either INSERTs or UPDATEs rows of a table as described below.
CREATE TABLE public.forecasts (
starttime timestamptz NOT NULL,
sky text NULL,
CONSTRAINT forecasts_pk PRIMARY KEY (starttime)
);
The Python scripts are each passed the place_code for the specific location to fetch weather data for as a command-line parameter. If you wish to clone this repo, you are most likely to want to fetch forecasts for your region. You will need to edit the yml files in .github/workflows e.g.
- name: execute py script # run metoffice.py with 'place_code' parameter
run: python metoffice.py <your place-code>`
and
- name: execute py script # run metoffice_update.py with 'place_code' parameter
run: python metoffice_update.py <your place-code>`
To find your place code, look at the url of the search result for your location returned from https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/
i.e.
https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/forecast /{place_code}?date=YYYY-mm-dd
In order for the scripts to update the repo with the latest weather forecast, the GITHUB_TOKEN requires write permission on the repository.
To individually download any generated files, you can select the 'raw' URL for the file i.e https://raw.github.com/...
Scheduling when the github actions should run is set using a crontab-style syntax. Times are specified in UTC. Note that the actual runtime for the action can differ from the scheduled time by a several minutes.