So, yes this is selfhosting related. I am working on an n8n flow to pull in weather data so that I can have this data on a dashboard. I can’t find any dockerized weather forecasting apps. Most of them connect to a personal weather station, which might be an option in the future. For the time being, this is a little project I’m working on.
Partial JSON snippet:
spoiler
0
json
cod "200"
message 0
cnt 40
list
0
dt 1780693200
main
temp 29.4
feels_like 29.23
temp_min 29.4
temp_max 29.68
pressure 1019
sea_level 1019
grnd_level 984
humidity 42
temp_kf -0.28
weather
I would like to display something like this:
spoiler
Current temperature: 23.25 °C
Feels like: 24.09 °C
Low / High: 23.25 °C / 23.60 °C
Humidity: 94%
Atmospheric pressure: 1023 hPa (sea level: 1023 hPa, ground level: 988 hPa)
Temperature correction factor (temp_kf): -0.35
Weather: Light rain
Weather code: 500
Short condition: Rain
Icon: 10d
So, this is for you devs or coders out there. I can produce the JSON data. I’m just not sure how to parse it to something meaningful. I’m sure Python will have to be incorporated, but unsure of how to proceed.
Maybe someone could point me in a direction to tuts, articles, or your own experience. Sorry the JSON data doesn’t format correctly. Lemmy formatting doesn’t seem to allow that.
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lots of ways to do it, where will it be displayed? if it’s in a console, jq would more than suffice.
if you want it to be processed heavily and added to an HTML document, probably something like a mix of jq and envsubst. you could forego all that and just use sed to inject the json into HTML then have JavaScript parse it out for you browser side.
if you want to store it in a database why not just store the whole json?
your requirements aren’t very clear on what you want this data for or how it will be used. without that there’s just too many variable solutions.
can you parse json? sure! what for/how will it be used? not sure.
hope this helps.
envsubst sed
Ahh more to explore. Thanks.
your requirements aren’t very clear on what you want this data for or how it will be used.
Apologies. As per usual, it’s all in my head and sometimes doesn’t make it to paper. I am using Homarr dashboard. Homarr has the ability to incorporate iframes. Ideally I would like to parse the JSON data into a prettier format perhaps adding some icons in the future once I get it all hammered out, and display it in an iframe on my dashboard.
Thank you for the leads and your time.
I don’t know much about homarr but it sounds like going with jq and envsubst might give you a faster solution that you can just iframe in your dashboard. though the learning curve can be steep if you’re unfamiliar with Linux command line.
I’m pretty sure you can literally pass in base64 encoded HTML to an iframe it will load in or pass it a publicly accessible file and it will work too.
I had messed around with building a locally hosted dashboard using similar methods so I’m pretty sure it will work.
i use Nushell for this! works with JSON, YAML, TOML, markdown, Polars Dataframes, SQLite, and a bunch of others including builtin parsing tools for whatever formats and a plugin ecosystem. i use it at work and for personal projects as my main shell, and it’s super handy for exploring, unpacking, sorting, and visualizing all sorts of data. i use it to:
- find specific parts of YAML cloud configs
- visualize JSON logs, including a parser that restructures
journalctllogs. - _re_structure data from CLIs to work with them as structured: git logs, Unix coreutils, etc
- script my environment: common
kubectlqueries, specific web API helpers, building and running and testing applications, etc
it is a slight learning curve, and technically you could do all of that with
bashorzshandjqorjc, but i appreciate the modern take on your base shell terminal env.it’s replaced both Python and Bash for me.
Nushell
https://www.nushell.sh/? I’ll add it to this evening’s reading material. I was skimming the site and saw this: https://www.nushell.sh/cookbook/jq_v_nushell.html in relation to jq.
Thanks for the input.
You can point the homarr iframe to a HTML file that consumes the n8n json output with JavaScript (fetch and transform data)
Even easier might be to point the iframe at the n8n endpoint but to add a HTML node as last node to your workflow. There you can use plain HTML and it directly supports the expression syntax to render the values from your previous json node.
Have a look at jq, a shell tool that can pass json and output in any way you want.
Or yes a python script will do that too
Example tutorial: How To Transform JSON Data with jq
Thanks for the lead. I’ll see what I can do with jq.
In my dealings with json output, jq gets the job done.
You’ve already got some options for the json, so I’ll just add:
dockerized weather forecasting apps
As a thought, maybe magic mirror? I’m (ab)using magic mirror as a dakboard/skylight style calendar, no mirror to be found, and the weather widgets are pretty good too. Another option would be Home Assistant if you’ve already got it up and running, you can set kiosk style with a single page to a specific logged in user, same with grafana if you’ve got it up. The Infinity data source is great for json ingest.
Home Assistant
I thought about Home Assistant, but I’m not sure what I’d do with the rest of it’s capabilities. I live in a house built in the latter part of the 40’s sitting in the middle of 22 acres. Besides a monitor for all my security cams which I already have set up, there’s not a whole lot to automate with Home Assistant around here. LOL 2 rooms, one bath, part of which have the original logs from when it was a log cabin. Not a whole lot to keep up with.
Oh see for me that sounds like a dream to set up HA for… (also the kind of acreage I’m trying to get). Off the top:
- Solar, track the energy generation and battery storage/health
- Have outbuildings? Check on them with esphome sensors!
- Into astronomy? TRACK IT THERE!
It mostly depends on what you’re doing with the property and what your goals might be. HA would be a lot to set up just for weather - magicmirror would definitely be the better choice for simple - but if you’ve got other stuff you are doing or want to do, HA would be a dream.
It mostly depends on what you’re doing with the property
Well, I used to be a farmer among other things in a former life. I’m 71 now and a bit too old to be running a farm full time. So I lease most of it out to other farmers in the area to grow silage for their livestock. I still retain some for my livestock, and personal grows. I also have parceled out a couple of half and quarter acre plots for the townies to grow their community gardens. Positive cash flow and all that.
So I don’t have the acreage right now, so I’m going to call this gardening level - but what I do with HA includes things like:
- Soil monitoring, mostly moisture level but I’m experimenting a bit with some NPK sensors. I have a couple of solar battery banks that power them, brings all that back wireless.
- Automated watering - rain barrel collection (with a sensor so I know how much is in there and so I don’t run a pump dry), relay control to open up the line and auto cut off. Combines a bit with weather monitoring so I don’t water heavily if rain is coming, waters in the evening to the morning to avoid evaporation
- Flow sensor checks the water usage off the rain barrels so I know things are working right
- Soil temp sensor is also on the list, not doing it right now just testing a few sensors still
- Gate controls meant for a chicken coop, right now its just raising a flag for funsies, but when I get the right property it’ll close off the coop at night to protect the chickens
- Light sensors to make sure the plants are getting enough, purely informational
- Barometric sensors (originally just to be alerted before a storm comes through, though I like it now so I know when my knee is going to hurt like hell so I can prep)
Inside I have sensors to check for moisture around my water heater, automation for my lighting (like when I get out of my bed, the led strip turns on, brightness determined by room light levels and time of day), etc. I work from home, so I also have a light above my door that acts like an on-air light - if I join a call my wife/kids know not to interrupt me (light works great, kids still need operational adjustment here and there).
If all you want is that weather dashboard though…
Magic Mirror + OneCallWeather module + rain map module and you’ve got a slick setup, maybe add in some camera streaming via rtsp for a bonus. And if you go homeassistant later, you can add a module for that too.
so I’m going to call this gardening level
Micro Farming. ;)
I feel like thats giving me too much credit haha
I am really into the idea of doing some hydroponics and microgreens too though - thats what I’m prepping for this winter at least!
There are many different ways to do this
What is the usecase?
Use Case: I want to display a daily and extended forecast on a dashboard perhaps via an iframe or other means. I get tired of going to the weather channel and having them complain about my ad blocking techniques. LOL Also, I thought it would be a good learning exercise for me. I’m using n8n to pull the raw data from OpenWeather API. I can generate the JSON data fine (at least it was an accomplishment for me), it’s just getting that JSON data into a prettier format to display on a dashboard with maybe some pretty little weather icons later on when I get it down pat.
I mentioned Python because it seemed like a language I see others use for this sort of thing, but I am willing to explore other avenues. I am not very strong at coding. I can muck by, fiddling with this or that until I finally get something that works. Then I immediately commit that to my notes because my brain is shit at remembering things.
I spent some time writing a script first in Python and then in ExcelScript at work to pull data from from OpenWeather API to compare ambient temperature and humidity to some of our indoor spaces. Both Python and JS (which ExcelScript is, basically) will make it very easy to pull the JSON from the API and pass whatever data you want down the line.
I don’t have any experience with dashboards or your setup in particular so I can’t give any good advice about how to go forward though. If you have a pre-existing dashboard, what makes it and what feeds it data? Is it a webpage or an app or such?
Is it a webpage or an app or such?
I am using the Homarr dashboard. It does have an iframe module that I think I could use once I pretty up the data.
What dashboard are you using? It seems weird to use n8n as the data should already be in json format
Just FYI the data you provided is not in json format
I’m using Homarr which has the capabilities of iframes.
Is this not JSON format?
ETA: I guess I should have posted it as such:
spoiler
[{"json":{"cod":"200","message":0,"cnt":40,"list":[{"dt":1780693200,"main":{"temp":29.4,"feels_like":29.23,"temp_min":29.4,"temp_max":29.68,"pressure":1019,"sea_level":1019,"grnd_level":984,"humidity":42,"temp_kf":-0.28},"weather":[{"id":803,"main":"Clouds","description":"broken clouds","icon":"04d"}],"clouds":{"all":65},"wind":{"speed":4.11,"deg":213,"gust":4.12},"visibility":10000,"pop":0,"sys":{"pod":"d"},"dt_txt":"2026-06-05 21:00:00"},{"dt":1780704000,"main":Is there are reason you can’t just use the Homar weather plugin?
Well, primarily because I wouldn’t learn anything. lol Plus, the Homarr weather plugin doesn’t give as much detail as I would like. It works, no doubt, I just wanted something a bit more.
First of all, there might be more out-of-the-box tools out there for building dashboards that require little or no programming knowledge, but I’ve never used or looked for them. Microsoft’s Power BI is one that I’ve heard of in passing, but fuck micro$lop lol. It’s just the only example I can think of that might be more approachable. You could google something like, “open source power BI alternative” to find other options.
Here are a couple of tutorials about using Python to parse JSON:
- w3schools tutorial for using Python to parse JSON
- geeksforgeeks article explaining how to use Python to read JSON from a file
That will only cover how to interact with the JSON data, but not how to build a dashboard, ofc. Displaying the data in some fashion (e.g. a web page) is a whole other set of tasks.
If you’re new to programming in general, I recommend going through a collection of beginner tutorials on a programming language (Python is a good choice, but pretty much any will work for learning the basics). Any course like that will cover principles that apply to most languages and that would help you accomplish this task. For example, they’ll cover things like reading to and from files, parsing the content of files, and doing shit with the content.
Here are a few Python courses/tutorial collections you can check out. You don’t need to do all of them, but I wanted to give you some options so you’re more likely to find one that you vibe with:
- w3schools Python tutorial
- official Python tutorial
- Python Basics: Introduction to Python - this is one of Real Python’s “learning paths” which are structured like a full-on course
- I/O Operations and String Formatting - another course from Real Python. Goes more in depth on this particular topic and I would recommend this after learning the basics from one of the other resources I’ve mentioned.
EDIT: Btw, you are definitly not limited to using Python for this. Lot’s of other programming language will do. You just mentioned it, so I ran with that, haha.
If you’re new to programming in general,
I’m not new to programming, I’m just not very strong or proficient at all at it. You’ve given me a lot to read, and I thank you.
Btw, you are definitly not limited to using Python for this
I mentioned Python because that seems like a language a lot of people use for this sort of thing, but I am willing to entertain any other avenues…except perhaps Microsoft’s Power BI, which is discontinued.
Thank you.
Its not discontinued, btw, just now in the cloud and not free.
Still would not recommend though, its awful imo.
