Intro to APIs using Python! Build a Weather Look-Up Application!

what's going on you guys welcome back to the channel and today's video is going to be an introduction to apis in python by building a weather lookup app [Music] okay so if you're unfamiliar with what an api is it basically stands for application programming interface and it's really any plug-in that you can uh use in your programming to gather information from the outside world so data sets exist on the internet of sports statistics weather statistics all sorts of information is out there and to look it up and use it inside your python files you use what's called an api and so uh to use apis in python the first thing you're always going to want to import is the requests module and so if you don't have it installed run pip install requests and you'll need it inside of your file and then the second thing is depending on the api application that you're using some of them require an api key some of them are totally free to use even without credentials the one i'll be doing in this video is a weather lookup program and it's completely free to use but if you go to openweathermap.org it is going to want you to sign in to give you an api key so uh all you have to do is make an account um give it an email and a username and then they're going to email you an api key it's still totally free to use they just require an account that's what we'll be doing in this video i have my api key stored in another uh dot pi file in my program just because um i would rather everybody who watches this video not use my api key because it's only like 60 lookups per hour um so just go get your own it's completely free but we're going to be using that in the program so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just real quickly set my api key equal to the variable that i made in my other dot pi file it's this api key dot weather but what yours is probably going to look like is something like this i'll copy in an example so this is just a made up one just to see the format but you're going to get an email with something very similar to this and you should put your api key in this variable for the rest of the tutorial um just know that this is where you want to store your api key okay so um what we'll do we're going to create a and on openweather.com after you do the tutorial there's a whole bunch of different um types of api calls that you can do so you could look up whether by just city name you can look up whether by latitude and longitude zip code all these different things and they're all slightly different api calls and they give you the format of how to do each of those on the api that's pretty typical but what we're going to do is we're going to do it by city name so what we'll do is we'll create an input for the user to enter their city name so we'll just say enter your city name and we'll get that right at the beginning and then what we're going to do is set this variable that we'll call link equal to what we need to be able to look it up and what's nice again going back to the website they tell you the exact call that you need to make for your api so we can grab this and copy it down into our program and put quotes around that so it's a string and go ahead and make this a formatted string because what we're going to do is make these the same as our variable names and you can see because i i kind of knew what we were doing um i already sort of had names that would fit right in there with them city name and api key and that's really all we have to do for the base of it but what you'll see and you don't have to do it right now if you want to get through the tutorial and then see this this is going to give us the weather in standard units which is going to be kelvin and most of you regardless of where you're watching from are going to want this in fahrenheit or celsius so what you're going to want to do is and units and then set it equal to imperial or metric depending what side of the pond you're on and then that's all you have to do now we're actually going to call that link so this is where that requests module comes in it's going to be response equals and that's basically apis there's a call and a response so what we're doing is we're going to call for information using this requests.get call and then we're going to put the information that we get back into a variable that's typically called response but you can call it whatever you want um and then what we put in there is our link so you could have put all of this inside of the dot get if you wanted to it's a little bit cleaner to put it in an intermediate variable and then to just format it properly you're going to want to do dot json with the parentheses and if this is your complete first introduction to apis don't worry about the dot json too much it just stands for javascript object notation and it's it's just a formatting of how almost all apis present their data it essentially looks a lot like a python library but that's a little more in-depth than we're gonna get in this tutorial and then what we're gonna do uh for now is we'll just print the response okay not in parentheses so i want you to see what's going on if we just do this step for now so let's go ahead and run it api intro enter our city name and i'm in pittsburgh do you know wherever you are whatever you want to do and what's cool is it gives you coordinates of your city it gives you weather information so you can see clouds uh it gives you the description it's overcast it'll tell you things about um all sorts of stuff but you can see there's this main section that's got uh what we want in it i guess what i i'm really interested in is the current temperature and it gives us a few things here temp feels like minimum maximum gives some pressure and humidity and this is where you can really look through all the data you're getting and decide what you think is most important um and you can kind of parse through it but what i want to do is i want to take a look here and see okay in this main section there's then temp feels like temp min and temp max so let's use those and now that data can essentially be called as if it was a python library so response main which is going to get us into that main section and then this is similar to an index within an index so like a list within a list because now we want the specific temperature and we got to put that in a variable and we'll say temp so then feels like we'll do the same thing for all four of those feels like is coming out of the response main section as well but that was a different uh key so we're putting in the dictionary keys essentially um feels like and then we want to do temp min equals response main temp man make sure you get your uh make sure you get all of your brackets in the correct spot it's very annoying troubleshooting when you have typed everything in properly but you put a bracket closed at the wrong spot okay temp min temp max this will be it and then we'll get back to the fun stuff main and temp max okay so what we did is we just put um four really important things and i'm gonna go ahead and pause this for now or uh uh get just comment out the print statement for now um and what i'd like to do is do a printed formatted string that kind of presents that data so i'd like to say at the location and then use curly brackets and we'll say city name so wherever we looked it up comma the temperature is currently and then temp uh and then i'm gonna put units on that degrees fahrenheit you might if you're metric you might want to do degree c or heck you could do kelvin if you wanted to um but i'm just going to leave it as this before i put those other three in just to make sure it's working properly but so now if i run this and i say my city is denver let's do a different city let's say denver it should just tell us the temperature in denver currently there we go 69 degrees wow that is significantly nicer than pittsburgh um okay so now what we can do is we can kind of say but it feels like and then do feels like and this is getting kind of long so let's put it on a new line we'll do backslash n and then we'll continue and we'll say there is a we'll put a period after feels like there is a max temp of time max and minimum of temp min today okay now let's go ahead and run this let's do some nice place let's say miami okay so it's currently 80 degrees but it feels like 79.75 and uh max temp of 83 and min of 77.9 so this is obviously uh just one example of what you can do with apis they're amazing tools for looking up sports statistics for looking up any kind of data that exists in these massive libraries online you can use it for all sorts of science and data analytics applications and this is just your first introduction to it i hope you found it useful if you did please consider leaving a like on the video subscribe to the channel it helps me out a ton and let me know about uh what you want to see more of on the channel in the comments below and if you had any questions with what you saw here today feel free to ask them in the comments below as well and i'll get back to you as soon as i can as always good luck with your code and thanks for watching thanks bye