weather-retrieve OpenWeatherMap Rust API server

This code implements something similar to a "proxy" for certain OpenWeatherMap API endpoints, specifically for the One Call API endpoint.

Provided endpoints

The server has two endpoints: /weather used to query current weather conditions and /forecast to query the hourly forecast for the next 48 hours.

Both endpoints are HTTP GET endpoints, with the parameters supply as a JSON in the body of the query, like the example below:

curl -d '{"city_query":"Madrid,ES", "units":"C"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X GET http://localhost:8080/forecast

As you can see the query has two parameters.

Query parameters

The first parameter is the city_query that consists of a city name that begins with a capitalized city name, followed by an , character and an ISO 3166-1 alfa-2 country code.

The second paramater is the units parameter, which helps indicate the temperature and other weather units, the valid values are the following:

• "C": "Metric units"
• "F": "Imperial units"
• "K": "Standard units, (temperature in Kelvin)"

Running the project

You need to set up to environment variables before running the project:

• CITY_DATABASE_PATH: Path for the cities_db.json file, you can find the file with the project.
• OPENWEATHER_API_KEY: Here you need to place your OpenWeatherMap API key. A key can be obtained by creating an account at OpenWeatherMap

Also if you wish to run the server in production mode which will simply log less output in the terminal, set the variable WEATHER_API_SERVER_PROD in you environment.

Once the previous steps are complete. Simply execute the command cargo run --release command or alternativelly cargo intall --path . and then weather-retrieve.

Running the tests

To run the tests simply run cargo test while inside the project directory.

Project architeture

The project is divided into multiple modules that encompass different functionalities:

• The main module contains the ActiX Web Server and the endpoint definitions.
• The app_state module contains the AppState struct which is the container for the shared state between the different ActiX workers.
  • It also contains the CachedElement struct which is the generic base for the request caching mechanism.
• In the weather_api module we have the APIClient struct which is the one tasked with query the OpenWeatherMap endpoint to retrieve the data requested in one of the application's own endpoints.
• The utils module contains some methods which are used during initialization of the ActiX web server.
• The models folder contains the various structs that are serialized/deserialized through the application.
  • The api submodule contains the structs that model the API reponses from the OpenWeatherMap calls perfomed by the APIClient struct.
  • The request submodule has the various struct used in the ActiX web server endpoint parameters both the Requests and the Reponses
  • Finally the state submodule contains the structs used in the AppState class, for example the API Cache dictionary keys.

Project dependencies

The power this project a certain number of crates have been used, they are the following:

• actix-web - Powering the Web server
• serde - For serializing/deserializing the multitude of models
• serde_with - For additional serialization/deserialization attributes
• serde_json - For serializing/deserializing JSON requests and responses
• reqwest - For query the OpenWeatherMap API
• env_logger - For ActiX logging
• log - For the app logging

Also for async testing:

• actix-rt - To be able to run async fn in tests

Deployment in production

Even though the application could be run in a production environment, the ideal approach would be to build a Docker image containig the optimized binary and the necessary environment variables as secrets, and then deploy that image either in AWS ECS, Google Compute Engine or Azure Container, with the option to also use a Kubernetes cluster if scalability is a concern.