Using mutt & cron To Text Yourself The Weather

I have a flip phone (it’s much less distracting than a smartphone), so I cannot use an app or a browser to check the weather when getting dressed in the morning. I tried NOAA’s dial-a-forecast, but the number for my state is out of service.

So, I decided to make a script that texts me the weather. This was surprisingly simple. It broke down into three steps:

  1. Get the weather
  2. Text it to myself
  3. Automate that

This post assumes that you have email working on a system-level. Since setting that up is out-of-scope for this post, you can either do it yourself or get an account on a pubnix.

Step one: getting the weather

There are two ways I went about this. At first, I just used wttr.in in image-mode (to avoid text-wrapping issues). This worked well but I generally prefer NOAA’s forecast, so I eventually switched to the weather.gov API. wttr.in weather.gov API

The wttr-version of the script looks like this: 

#!/bin/sh

# POSIX sh lacks mktemp
umask -S u=rw,g=,o= > /dev/null
unset WEATHER
trap 'rm -f "$WEATHER"' INT TERM HUP EXIT
WEATHER="/tmp/$$.$USER.$(awk 'BEGIN{srand(); print rand()}').png"
:> "$WEATHER"

curl --silent https://wttr.in/LOCATION.png?1Fqn > "$WEATHER"

Replace LOCATION with your location / zip-code.

Step two: texting it to myself

Now that we have the weather, it’s time to text it. I thought this part would be challenging, but it turned out to be very simple. I found out that most US carriers provide an email-to-MMS gateway, which meant that I could just send myself an email and it would show up as a text.

I chose mutt instead of something POSIXly correct because attachments are really simple with mutt, and this is just a hack.

The full script now looks like this: 

#!/bin/sh

# POSIX sh lacks mktemp
umask -S u=rw,g=,o= > /dev/null
unset WEATHER
trap 'rm -f "$WEATHER"' INT TERM HUP EXIT
WEATHER="/tmp/$$.$USER.$(awk 'BEGIN{srand(); print rand()}').png"
:> "$WEATHER"

curl --silent https://wttr.in/LOCATION.png?1Fqn > "$WEATHER"
mutt -a "$WEATHER" -- 8005551234@mms-gateway.example

Step three: automating it

I then had a script that texted me the weather when run, but I wanted to get the weather every morning. To do this, I just made a simple cronjob (run crontab -e): 

# minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week command
0 10 * * * /home/u9000/bin/pushweather.sh

That’s it. This project was surprisingly simple but very fun, and I use it daily.