When you’re travelling, constantly checking the weather forecast and planning your activities accordingly can become a real drag. Whatever the Weather solves this for you! It’s a single-page web application that generates an itinerary of activity recommendations for each day of your trip, based on a live daily weather forecast.
We created Whatever the Weather during our final two-week engineering project at the Makers Academy coding bootcamp. We worked collaboratively, following Agile practices, to design and build the app from scratch.
Install dependencies by running npm install in the /api and /frontend directories.
To start the api server:
npm startTo start the frontend dev server:
npm run devThen open http://localhost:5173/ in your browser.
To generate an itinerary, you will need a (free) subscription to OpenWeather's "One Call by Call" subscription plan. Once you have a valid API key, create an .env file in /api with the following environment variable definition:
OPENWEATHER_API_KEY={your_key}
To use the email functionality, configure the security settings of an email address you own to be compatible with STMP transport via Nodemailer. Update the code of emailController.js accordingly, and define the following environment variables:
EMAIL_ACCOUNT={your_email_address}
EMAIL_PASS={your_email_password}
To run Cypress tests using Launchpad, in /frontend:
npm run testTo run Jest tests, in /api:
npm test
- Created a team charter where we set out our working practices, team goals, personal goals and team values
- Set about defining the product, creating user stories and narrowing down a Minimum Viable Product
- Set out a sprint schedule of 2/3 day sprints and organised team meetings and retros
- Used Excallidraw to create workflow diagrams and wireframes
- Used trello tickets to break down the project into clear, concise and manageable units of work
There is significant scope for recommendActivities, the function that handles the business logic, to be expanded and developed:
- Ensure any repeated activities are scheduled as far apart as possible
- Maintaining optimum weather/activity combinations for non user-selected suggestions
- Adding a min/max temperature filter
Other potential areas for development:
- A more tailored list of activity options for each city
- Include links for suggested activities
- Ability for the user to force certain activity/day combinations
- An additional page for historical weather patterns for a given city
- User login functionality to save preferences and itineraries
This project was built using Node v20.2, and uses the following technologies:
- Express.js – backend API server framework
- React.js – frontend UI library
- Vite – frontend build tool (replacing
create-react-app) - Jest – backend testing framework
- SuperTest – HTTP server testing library
- Cypress – frontend testing framework
- ESLint – code analysis
- dotenv – environment variable management
- nodemon – automatic server restarting
- nodemailer – email sending
- react-datepicker – Datepicker component
- npm – dependency management