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Weather station scripts

They're free, but use at your own risk

The scripts referenced here are used in the operation of this weather station, and may be freely copied and used to support your station. Please note that you use these scripts at your own risk. No warranty is expressed or implied. I accept no liability for any damages that may ensue from their use.
You will need to configure them for your own particular weather station website.
RSS feed for Scripts Updates A RSS Feed is available to help keep you informed on updates to the scripts.

Many of these scripts are now available on GitHub at https://github.com/ktrue

Buy Me A Coffee If you find one or more of the scripts useful to you, please consider making a donation to help offset the routine expenses of operation of this website.
Thanks for your kind support!

A Version History is available -- check back from time to time to see if there are updates to scripts you have downloaded earlier. Announcements of version updates and new scripts are made on WXForum.net and Weather-Watch forums and saratogaWXPHP Twitter account as they become available.

Note: Twitter widget has been disabled 3-Jul-2023 since it no longer displays the recent update Tweets.

This page was updated Tuesday, 13-Jun-2023 8:07 PM

TweetWX - post weather updates to Twitter using OAuth

Note: this script set is deprecated. Twitter has suspended the application ID of 'TweetWX' 12:00 13-Jun-2023 Pacific. DO NOT INSTALL, and remove any cron jobs using these scripts -- they no longer work

This set of scripts can be used to post status updates to your Twitter account for current weather conditions, weather forecasts, or advisories. It is currently set up to work with WeatherDisplay and the WD/AJAX/PHP templates, and the NOAA NWS forecast service.
The script uses OAuth instead of the basic user:pass authorization now in use via the Twitter API.. The Twitter basic user:pass authentication is discontinued by Twitter on 30-Jun-2010 and all applications must now use OAuth instead.

The OAuth process is more complicated than the old user:pass basic authentication. It's overall actions are shown in the diagram below:

OAuth process flow diagram

OAuth Process Flow Legend

This package has two setup functions that serve to obtain a durable access token/access token secret for the application to securely update your Twitter status with conditions from WD and forecasts from NOAA/NWS.
My thanks to Joe Chung who wrote a simple OAuth/Twitter set of functions documented on his blog and these scripts are based on his code.

Requirements:

  • These scripts need PHP5+ to run. They will not run on PHP4.
  • You will need a valid Twitter account to receive the postings.
  • These scripts assume you have the WD/AJAX/PHP template running on your website being updated by Weather-Display software. (Conditions tweet is based on the testtags.php data)
  • The TweetWX-forecast.php script uses the NOAA NWS forecast from advforecast2.php (WD-USA template set)
  • Note: if your site is running on GoDaddy linux hosting, you need to make a change in TweetWX-global.php in the function do_post(). Change the verify host and verify peer to FALSE (i.e.):

    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => false,
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,

    since their cURL does not currently support the verify host/peer options.
    Thanks to Jason at kswxlink.com for this discovery.

Setup

  1. Download the distribution .zip file, unpack it preserving directory structure, and upload contents to your weather website.
  2. (optional) Register your copy of the application with Twitter at http://twitter.com/oauth_clients/new using your Twitter account.
    This is optional as you can use the built-in credentials for the application based on my Twitter application registration for TweetWX.
    If you do your own registration, then copy the consumer key and consumer secret key values into the TweetWX-common.php values at the top of the page. Then save and upload the modified TweetWX-common.php file.
  3. Run TweetWX-setup1.php on your website.
    It will produce a page with two OAuth request values that must be copied into TweetWX-setup2.php and a link to Twitter to allow connection of the TweetWX app to your twitter account.
    1. Click on the link and Twitter will ask you to sign-in, then ask permission for TweetWX to be allowed access to your account.
    2. If you agree, that will produce a Twitter page with a verification number, and that number needs to be copied into the proper variable inside of TweetWX-setup2.php.
    Update TweetWX-setup2.php with the two request keys and the verification number from Twitter and
    upload the modified TweetWX-setup2.php to your website.
  4. Run TweetWX-setup2.php on your website. It will produce two keys as copy code.
    These keys are to be copied into the top of TweetWX-conditions.php and TweetWX-forecast.php replacing the values there.
    These OAuth credentials do not expire (AFAIK) and using them allows the script(s) to post to your Twitter account status.
    Keep these access keys secret .. they are similar to your user:pass on the old basic authentication scheme and allow read/write to your Twitter account.
  5. Modify TweetWX-conditions.php to insert the keys from your run of TweetWX-setup2.php (in step 4), and also change the directory pointer to where your testtags.php is located (relative file addressing).
  6. Modify TweetWX-forecast.php to insert the keys from your run of TweetWX-setup2.php (in step 4) and also change the directory point to where your advforecast2.php script is located (relative file addressing)

If you want to redo your OAuth keys, then start at step (3) and proceed through step (6). I don't know how long the interim keys last, so make sure you do step (3) followed shortly by step (4). Once step (4) is completed, you can take as long as you like to do steps (5) and (6).

Operation on your website

The best and most reliable method to execute the scripts on your website is via cron as a cronjob. Make sure you invoke PHP5 to run the scripts. I've found that a simple shell script makes running the cron job easier as you can set the home directory (etc).
Something like cron-TweetWX-conditions.sh:

#!/bin/bash
cd /my/home/directory/on/webserver/TweetWX
# Clean out old copies if any
ps auxw | grep "TweetWX-conditions.php" | grep -v 'grep' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill >/dev/null &2>1
/usr/bin/php5 -q TweetWX-conditions.php > TweetWX-conditions.tmp
cp TweetWX-conditions.tmp TweetWX-conditions.html
#

Which will run the script and save the last output into TweetWX-conditions.html so you can follow the progress of the last execution.
Don't forget to chmod +x the script above (after changing the cd statement for your website document root). A crontab entry of

4 * * * *  /my/home/directory/on/webserver/cron-TweetWX-conditions.sh

works to tweet my conditions at 4 minutes after the hour, 24 times a day. I use a similar script for the forecasts, but the schedule is for execution by cron as 47 past the hour at 3,6,10,15,18 and 22h:

47 3,6,10,15,18,22 * * *  /my/home/directory/on/webserver/cron-TweetWX-forecast.sh

If you don't happen to have cron available on your webhoster, then you can configure Weather-Display to do HTML downloads on the TweetWX-conditions.php and TweetWX-forecast.php webpages from your website. Use WD, Control Panel, FTP & Connections, HTTP Download TAB. You have 3 setups you can use, so you can have one run hourly for your conditions and a different one run every 4 hours for your forecasts.

Download: TweetWX.zip (V1.03 - 27-May-2014) (see Version History) (Deprecated 13-Jun-2023)

 

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