How to get daily weather notification on mobile using Node.js and Twilio API ?
Looking for weather information daily is a trivial task. As programmers, we can make this task easier by creating a notification service. We will use the Twilio SMS API for sending SMS and Node.js for writing the service which runs every day at a particular time.
Getting Twilio Credentials: To use Twilio APIs, we need to register our app and get the API keys from Twilio’s console. We need to get ACCOUNT SID
, AUTH TOKEN
, and TRIAL NUMBER
. You can get all these credentials from here.
Save these credentials to .env
file in your project’s root directory along with your phone number. Since its a security best practice to save every credential in a separate file.
ACC_SID = 'your-account-sid' AUTH_TOKEN = 'your-auth-token' TO = 'your-number-with-country-code' FROM = 'twilio-trial-number' |
Sending SMS: In order to send SMS, we can use Twilio’s library for Node.js. Install the library using the following command:
npm install twilio
Now let’s test our credentials by sending a message. Add the following code to the index.js
file.
// Getting Data from .env file const accountSid = process.env.ACC_SID; const authToken = process.env.AUTH_TOKEN; const twilio = require( "twilio" ); const client = new twilio(accountSid, authToken); client.messages .create({ body: "Hello from w3wiki!" , to: process.env.TO, from: process.env.FROM }) .then(message => console.log(message.sid)); |
If all goes good then you will receive an SMS from Twilio with the text “Hello from w3wiki!”.
Getting the weather information: To get the latest weather information, we will use Openweathermap API which is freely available.
To use the API signup on the website and go to the dashboard to generate the API key as follows:
We will use the Node.js’s request
library to fetch the data from the API. Install the dependency using the following command:
npm install request
And then add the following code snippet to the index.js
file.
// Import request library const request = require( "request" ); function getdata() { request( "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=delhi&appid=<your-api-key>&units=metric" , { json: true }, (err, res, body) => { if (err) { return console.log(err); } // Printing fetched data console.log(body); }); } // Calling function getData(); |
Now, create a function to send notification data and add the code for sending SMS like below:
// Send message function sendNotification(msg) { client.messages .create({ body: msg, to: process.env.TO, from: process.env.FROM }) .then(message => console.log(message.sid)); } |
Now we have to create a message from the data received from the weather API. Replace the getData(
) function with the following code:
function getdata(){ request( "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=delhi&appid=<your-api-key>&units=metric" , { json: true }, (err, res, body) => { if (err) { return console.log(err); } // Create a message let msg = `\nToday's Weather : \n${body.weather[0].main}, ${body.main.temp}°C\nHumidity : ${body.main.humidity}% `; // Calling Send Message function sendNotification(msg); }); } |
Now, to send the message every day, we have to set up a cronjob using the node-cron
library.
npm install node-cron
Add the cronjob to call getData() method every day at 8:00 AM:
// Importing library const twilio = require( "node-cron" ); // Cronjob runs everyday at 8:00 AM cron.schedule( "0 8 * * *" , () => { // Calling getData method which // calls the send message method getData(); }); |
If everything goes fine then you will receive an SMS displaying the weather information.
Output:
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