☀️ weather-msg

The goal of this project is to build an AWS Lambda function which sends a SMS message every morning to a user's phone, summarising today's weather forecast.

Features

• AWS Lambda function automatically triggered every morning at 7:30 am to send a short SMS message
• SMS message summarises the latest weather forecast for Sydney, including maximum temperature, chance of rain, and time period when sun protection is recommended.

Built with

• BeautifulSoup - Python library used to scrap the Bureau of Meteorology's web page for Sydney weather
• Twilio - API used to send SMS messages
• AWS Lambda - Used to automatically execute Python code every morning.

Method

A brief description of the steps in this project:

1. Web scraping

• Use Python's Requests library to grab HTML content from the Sydney Forecast webpage
• Use BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML content and pull out relevant information, including today's weather description, maximum temperature, chance of rain, and sun protection recommendations.

2. Use Twilio to send SMS

• Format the scraped data into a tidy text string, to be used in the body of the SMS message
• Send the SMS message using Twilio's Python helper library.

3. Build AWS Lambda function

• Combine the code from steps 1-2 into a function
• Create a zip archive of library dependencies, together with the function code
• Upload the deployment package to AWS Lambda
• Schedule the AWS Lambda function to run every morning, by using a cron expression in a CloudWatch trigger.

References

• https://towardsdatascience.com/make-data-acquisition-easy-with-aws-lambda-python-in-12-steps-33fe201d1bb4
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_pv/lambda/latest/dg/python-programming-model.html