This is a simple web application that displays the current weather and seven-day forecast for a give ZIP code or City, State. It caches the results for a particular ZIP code for 30 minutes.
You can try it here on
Heroku. You can either use
the search box or type in a URL like /forecasts/90210.
- Ruby on Rails 7.1.3 with most of the subsystems disabled as they're not used. For example, ActiveRecord isn't used in this app and there's no database.
- Ruby 3.3.0
- Bootstrap 5.3
- RSpec for testing
- Geocodio is used to convert the City and State to a ZIP code. It's also used to convert a City and State or ZIP code to a latitude and longitude.
- The National Weather Service API is used to get the current weather and forecast data.
This app is a simple example of a web application that uses a couple of web APIs and the Rails cache.
Because it's so simple, it deals with the external APIs pretty naively. It doesn't do any real error handling, retries, and etc. Before calling this done, I'd want to add some eroor handling, and exploring whether some of the calls can be done as a background worker. (There are an awful l 7C85 ot of external services being accessed in a single web request!)
Again, because it's so simple, we only use Rails' in-memory cache. This caching is local to a single process, and doesn't last between server restarts. To make the app production-ready, we'd want to use a more robust caching system like Memcached or Redis.
If you're interested about how the code was developed, you can follow along commit by commit.
I also spent some time upfront exploring available APIs. I used that info to firm up the app's requirements as I saw what was available.
This is a standard Rails app, and is quite easy to get running.
Clone the repo:
git clone git@github.com:mjbellantoni/greysky.gitInstall the dependencies:
bundle installThe app doesn't use a database, so there's no need to run migrations.
You will need a Codio API key for the development environment and that
will need to be present in GEOCODIO_API_KEY. We're using the
dotenv gem, so you can put the
API key in a .env file in the root of the project.
Run the tests:
./bin/rails specRun the server:
./bin/rails serverYou can now visit the app at http://localhost:3000.
This is a standard Rails app, so you can deploy it to Heroku or any similar service pretty easily. It does not require a database, a queueing system, or anything like that.
It make use of a couple external systems that require API keys that should be present in environment variabls.
| Service | Variable | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Codio | GEOCODIO_API_KEY |
Geocoding |
| Sentry | SENTRY_DSN |
Bug snagging |
The National Weather Service API doesn't require an API key.
Here are some things I'd want to do if I continued to push this work forward.
- More tests. Lots more tests.
- Use Memcached or Redis for caching.
- Check for errors and rate limits from external services and retry or otherwise handle them gracefully.
- Explore using a background worker for the NWS API calls. We'd use a polling Stimulus controller or TurboStreams along with that.
- Explore other opportunities for caching.
- Add search box into the menu bar.
- Make the app work without JavaScript.