API interaction scripts in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

API Interaction Scripts

📖 Scenario: You work in a small company that needs to get weather information from an online service. You will write a simple Bash script to interact with a public weather API to get the current temperature for a city.

🎯 Goal: Build a Bash script that fetches weather data from an API and shows the temperature for a specific city.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable with the city name

Create a variable with the API endpoint URL

Use curl to get the weather data

Extract the temperature value from the JSON response using jq

Print the temperature with a friendly message

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Many jobs require fetching data from online services using scripts. This project shows how to automate getting live data like weather.

💼 Career

Scripting API calls is a common task for system administrators, developers, and data analysts to automate data retrieval and processing.

1

Set the city variable

Create a Bash variable called CITY and set it to the exact value London.

Bash Scripting

# Create a variable called CITY and set it to London
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the syntax VARIABLE_NAME="value" to create a variable in Bash.

2

Set the API URL variable

Create a Bash variable called API_URL and set it to the exact value https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=51.5074&longitude=-0.1278¤t_weather=true.

Bash Scripting

CITY="London"
# Create a variable called API_URL with the given URL
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes to include the full URL string in the variable.

3

Fetch weather data and extract temperature

Use curl with the variable API_URL to get the weather data. Then use jq to extract the current temperature from the JSON path .current_weather.temperature. Save this temperature in a variable called TEMP.

Bash Scripting

CITY="London"
API_URL="https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=51.5074&longitude=-0.1278&current_weather=true"
# Use curl and jq to get temperature and save it in TEMP
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use $(command) to capture command output into a variable.

Use curl -s to get data silently.

Use jq '.current_weather.temperature' to extract temperature.

4

Print the temperature with a message

Write a echo command to print: "The current temperature in London is X°C", where X is the value stored in the variable TEMP.

Bash Scripting

CITY="London"
API_URL="https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=51.5074&longitude=-0.1278&current_weather=true"
TEMP=$(curl -s "$API_URL" | jq '.current_weather.temperature')
# Print the temperature with a friendly message
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo and include the variable ${TEMP} inside the string.