Need help getting started with REST API

Developers
1

Hi - I am trying to get started with the REST API using Python and need some help. I can get the current observation using the following Python code:

Get Latest Observation

resp = requests.get(‘https://swd.weatherflow.com/swd/rest/observations/station/’ + stationID + ‘?token=’ + token)
if resp.status_code != 200:
print(‘Error accessing station’)
else:
print(resp.json())

However, I don’t understand how to modify this to get a range of observations by passing things like the “obs_air”, “day_offset”, “time_start”, “time_end”, and “format” parameters. Could someone please advise or provide an example?

Thanks!

2

You can pass the extra parameters as query string parameters in the URL. That is you pass them after the ? in the URL (token is a query string parameter as well), and you separate them with an ampersand. For example, you can use time_start and time_end like:

https://swd.weatherflow.com/swd/rest/observations/station/1234?token=xxxx&time_start=yyyy&time_end=zzzz

or you can use day_offset like:

https://swd.weatherflow.com/swd/rest/observations/station/1234?token=xxxx&day_offset=0

Hope this helps!

3

if click on the api in the menu on the top of this page, you can play with it and see how it is formatted

4

Super helpful - thank you!!!

5

OK - still having problems. I can get the station status information but when I try to retrieve the observations I am getting an authorization error. The command works the api webpage but not from my python script. Advice appreciated! Code below.

Try getting observations from the station

deviceID = ‘129977’
resp = requests.get(‘https://swd.weatherflow.com/swd/rest/observations/device/129977?day_offset=0?format=csv’ )
if resp.status_code != 200:
# This means something went wrong.
print(‘Error’)
else:
print(resp)

6

Have you generated a token from your account and use it to authenticate ?

In settings, down the page Data authorizations to generate one or find it back if already generated

1 Like
7

As Eric said the URL you are using in requests.get is missing the token= parameter. Follow Eric’s instructions to get a token and then add this into the URL. You may also want to change the format=csv parameter as I have no idea how requests will deal with this option. It might work fine, so feel free to ignore

1 Like
8

Thanks guys! I ended up authenticating using the cURL command provided in the API webpage and things seem to work OK now. Seems like the format-csv parameter works OK. Now to figure out how to get the resulting mess into a pandas dataframe. (The idea of dumping the observations into a series of Google Sheets documents using the IFTTT initially sounded messy, but is sounding better now. This whole process seems more complicated than it should be (at least for me)…