LOWeather

LOWeather is a small app that will combine weather conditions from a specific location with current wave conditions on Lake of the Woods.

• The current weather location is Wheeler's Point which is where the Rainy River meets the Lake of the Woods.
• The current wave conditions come from a Wave Buoy located in the middle of Big Traverse Bay on Lake of the Woods.

How it works

• app.py - Flask web app that serves a single page (/)
• weather.py - Gets current weather and past 5 days of precipitation from the Open-Meteo API (no API key needed)
• buoy.py - Gets the latest wave height and direction from the Obscape buoy portal (uses the API key in the file)
• templates/index.html and static/ - The page layout, styling and icon
• open-mateo.py - Old standalone test script, not used by the app

Requirements

• Python packages: flask and gunicorn (listed in requirements.txt). Everything else uses the Python standard library.
• The server needs outbound internet access to api.open-meteo.com and obscape.com.
• The app runs on port 8090.

Installing with Docker (recommended)

These steps work on any Linux server. Other operating systems work too if Docker is installed.

1. Install Docker and Docker Compose

Follow the official instructions for your OS: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

Check that it's installed:

docker --version
docker compose version

(Optional) Let your user run Docker without sudo, then log out and back in:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

2. Get the code

git clone https://github.com/kennyehh/LOWeather.git
cd LOWeather

3. Build and start the app

docker compose up -d --build

• --build builds the image from the Dockerfile
• -d runs it in the background
• restart: unless-stopped in docker-compose.yml makes it start again automatically after a reboot or crash

4. Check that it's running

docker compose ps
docker compose logs -f

Then open a browser to:

http://<server-ip>:8090

If the page doesn't load from another device, make sure port 8090 is open in the server's firewall. For example:

# Fedora / RHEL (firewalld)
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8090/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

# Ubuntu / Debian (ufw)
sudo ufw allow 8090/tcp

Updating to a new version

cd LOWeather
git pull
docker compose up -d --build

Stopping / removing

docker compose down

Changing the port

To use a different port on the host, change only the left side of the port mapping in docker-compose.yml. For example, to serve on port 80:

    ports:
      - "80:8090"

Then run docker compose up -d again.

Running without Docker (for testing)

Requires Python 3.

git clone https://github.com/kennyehh/LOWeather.git
cd LOWeather
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate        # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run with the Flask development server (port 5000):

python app.py

Or run with gunicorn, the same way the Docker container does (port 8090, Linux/macOS only):

gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8090 --workers 3 --timeout 60 app:app