Air Quality Watcher

This is an example watcher for an Air Quality, site, the idea being that we have a small list of locations that we want to watch, and record values about air quality over time. You can use (and modify) this particular example, or follow the instructions below to create it from scratch.

What is WatchMe?

WatchMe is a tool for reproducible monitoring. This means that you can create one or more tasks to monitor web or system resources, and collection version controlled results (git) at a regular interval (cron). For more details, see the documentation base

Clone

To clone this repository (and start with the watchers here), you can first install watchme:

$ pip install watchme

and then get the repository:

              # repository                                     # watcher name
$ watchme get https://www.github.com/vsoch/watchme-air-quality air-quality
Added watcher watchme-air-quality

Conflrm that it was added:

$ watchme list
purpleair
air-quality

This will install the data to your $HOME/.watchme folder by default, unless you've exported another WATCHME_BASE_DIR. Before you run the task, take a look at the data that has already been collected:

TODO

You can then run the task manually:

$ watchme run air-quality

But likely you want to activate and schedule the task to run.

Schedule the Task

Instead of a manual run, you likely want to run the task and look for changes over time. You can do that like this:

$ watchme schedule air-quality @hourly

And then check that an entry has been added to crontab:

$ crontab -l
@hourly watchme run air-quality # watchme-air-quality

Finally, ensure that the watcher is active:

$ watchme activate air-quality

Inspect task data

Finally, you likely want to inspect your data.

under development

Limitations

Since this is an early example, it's intended to be simple. Each task folder is allocated to a city. A more reasonable approach for a more popular resource would be to define a task that takes a list of variables (of cities in this case) and then saves the results in the same folder:

 task-air-quality/
     oakland.txt
     durham.txt
     pittsburgh.txt

I'm working on ways to do this (for example, allow for installation of custom tasks without needing to define them in advance). We also could define lists of variables in tasks folders, but I don't want to overcomplicate things.

Creation

If you want to reproduce creating this watcher, it looks something like this:

Install Watchme

$ pip install watchme[urls-dynamic]

Initialize the base folder at $HOME/.watchme

$ watchme init

Create the air-quality watcher:

$ watchme create air-quality

And then install each of the tasks as follows:

$ watchme add task-air-oakland url@http://aqicn.org/city/california/alameda/oakland-west func@get_url_selection selection@#aqiwgtvalue [email protected] get_text@true active@true type@urls

$ watchme add task-air-boulder url@http://aqicn.org/city/usa/colorado/boulder-cu/athens/ func@get_url_selection selection@#aqiwgtvalue [email protected] get_text@true active@true type@urls

$ watchme add task-air-pittsburgh url@http://aqicn.org/city/usa/pennsylvania/allegheny/parkway-east/ func@get_url_selection selection@#aqiwgtvalue [email protected] get_text@true active@true type@urls

$ watchme add task-air-durham url@http://aqicn.org/city/usa/north-carolina/durham-armory/ func@get_url_selection selection@#aqiwgtvalue [email protected] get_text@true active@true type@urls

You can easily export a current configuration file (how I produced the commands above).

$ watchme inspect air-quality --add-command