BOM Buddy

BOM Buddy is an Australian weather CLI utility designed for Linux environments. It might work on other operating systems, but this is untested. All data obtained belongs to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (copyright notice). They do not endorse or support this software, and it could stop working without warning if they change their systems.

Features

• Periodically check the weather and cache it in a local SQLite database
• Output the current weather with customizable formatting (for use in status bars)
• View the 7-day forecast
• View the hourly forecast
• Download radar images and view radar loops in MPV

Possible future features

• Send desktop notifications when weather warnings are issued
• View past observations

Installation

Cargo

cargo install bom-buddy

Arch User Repository

Your method of choice e.g. paru -S bom-buddy

Usage

Configuration

Run bom-buddy --help to display default path locations (XDG spec) and the flags to modify them. Some options in the config file can be overridden by CLI flags. See the help output of each command for more details.

Initial setup

Run bom-buddy init in a terminal and follow the prompts to select your location.

Displaying the weather

Show the current weather with bom-buddy current. The formatting can be modified in the config file or with the --fstring flag. Use --list-keys to show available fields.

To use in a status bar (or other external program), just capture the output of current. By default it only queries the database to ensure a quick response, relying on bom-buddy monitor to check for updates. If your status bar updates asynchronously or an occasional delay is acceptable, you can use bom-buddy current --check and avoid the monitor command. It will only perform a check when an update is due, not on every invocation of the process. See here for an example of an async status bar.

The hourly and daily commands will output their respective forecasts formatted as a table.

Radar

View a radar loop in MPV by running bom-buddy radar --open-mpv. With the --monitor flag, it will periodically update the loop with new images.