Scoping first, code at bottom. Kewl?

Is this a “learn it by coding it” project or is it a “I want this thing to exist, no one has done it, but my code skills aren’t quite there” project?

If the latter, would you consider iterating via llm (as you mention n8n, so I figure you’re in that space anyway) or is this a purely a learn by doing thing?

Come to think of it, there is actually a third option here. You could get the LLM to teach you how to code it by writing some pseudo code and asking it for pointers / starting steps. Claude web is pretty good for that sort of thing, I think. You can get it to tailor its lessons to what you need without the tedium of starting at “Hello World”.

You seem like the sort that could keep that interaction honest and not let it just do everything.

PS: I read about your setup - sounds brilliant. Go you good thing.

PPS: n8n has a Code node (JavaScript), and parsing that weather JSON into a formatted string is probably like 15 lines of code. Something like -

const data = $input.first().json;

return [{ json: { temperature: data.list[0].main.temp } }];

add a Code node after your HTTP request in n8n. Get one single value out first. If you see a temperature number in the output, you win.

Pulling Python in just to parse JSON is probably adding a tool you don’t need for this.

JavaScript may be ass but it’s literally there, so it’s omnipresent ass. :)

Once you’ve got the JSON parsed, turn it into one small HTML weather card.

const data = $input.first().json; const item = data.list[0];

const html = <div> <h3>Weather</h3> <p>Current temperature: ${item.main.temp} °C</p> <p>Feels like: ${item.main.feels_like} °C</p> <p>Humidity: ${item.main.humidity}%</p> <p>Condition: ${item.weather[0].description}</p> </div>;

return [{ json: { html } }];

(Sorry about the formatting ; Lemmy formatting is weird AF)

Anyway, as one journeyman to another, that’s where I’d start poking. ICBW.

i use Nushell for this! works with JSON, YAML, TOML, markdown, Polars Dataframes, SQLite, and a bunch of others including builtin parsing tools for whatever formats and a plugin ecosystem. i use it at work and for personal projects as my main shell, and it’s super handy for exploring, unpacking, sorting, and visualizing all sorts of data. i use it to:

• find specific parts of YAML cloud configs
• visualize JSON logs, including a parser that restructures journalctl logs.
• _re_structure data from CLIs to work with them as structured: git logs, Unix coreutils, etc
• script my environment: common kubectl queries, specific web API helpers, building and running and testing applications, etc

it is a slight learning curve, and technically you could do all of that with bash or zsh and jq or jc, but i appreciate the modern take on your base shell terminal env.

it’s replaced both Python and Bash for me.

In the Homarr docs, there is this: https://homarr.dev/docs/widgets/iframe/

Towards the end there is a link to https://github.com/diogovalentte/homarr-iframes which contains many examples of some content formatted nicely to fit within Homarr iframes and a docker container you can use to make a url that the iframe widget can consume. They used Go which is only a little harder than Python to read.

Seems like this one - https://github.com/diogovalentte/homarr-iframes/tree/main/src/sources/changedetectionio - makes a request to a JSON api, for example.

lots of ways to do it, where will it be displayed? if it’s in a console, jq would more than suffice.

if you want it to be processed heavily and added to an HTML document, probably something like a mix of jq and envsubst. you could forego all that and just use sed to inject the json into HTML then have JavaScript parse it out for you browser side.

if you want to store it in a database why not just store the whole json?

your requirements aren’t very clear on what you want this data for or how it will be used. without that there’s just too many variable solutions.

can you parse json? sure! what for/how will it be used? not sure.

hope this helps.

Since you are using n8n, pull the data on a schedule and save it in a data table. Then create a webhook to serve the content as you want it. N8n can transform the JSON data, I can provide a sample tomorrow.

Have a look at jq, a shell tool that can pass json and output in any way you want.

Or yes a python script will do that too

You can point the homarr iframe to a HTML file that consumes the n8n json output with JavaScript (fetch and transform data)

Even easier might be to point the iframe at the n8n endpoint but to add a HTML node as last node to your workflow. There you can use plain HTML and it directly supports the expression syntax to render the values from your previous json node.

There are many different ways to do this

What is the usecase?

You’ve already got some options for the json, so I’ll just add:

dockerized weather forecasting apps

As a thought, maybe magic mirror? I’m (ab)using magic mirror as a dakboard/skylight style calendar, no mirror to be found, and the weather widgets are pretty good too. Another option would be Home Assistant if you’ve already got it up and running, you can set kiosk style with a single page to a specific logged in user, same with grafana if you’ve got it up. The Infinity data source is great for json ingest.

First of all, there might be more out-of-the-box tools out there for building dashboards that require little or no programming knowledge, but I’ve never used or looked for them. Microsoft’s Power BI is one that I’ve heard of in passing, but fuck micro$lop lol. It’s just the only example I can think of that might be more approachable. You could google something like, “open source power BI alternative” to find other options.

Here are a couple of tutorials about using Python to parse JSON:

• w3schools tutorial for using Python to parse JSON
• geeksforgeeks article explaining how to use Python to read JSON from a file

That will only cover how to interact with the JSON data, but not how to build a dashboard, ofc. Displaying the data in some fashion (e.g. a web page) is a whole other set of tasks.

If you’re new to programming in general, I recommend going through a collection of beginner tutorials on a programming language (Python is a good choice, but pretty much any will work for learning the basics). Any course like that will cover principles that apply to most languages and that would help you accomplish this task. For example, they’ll cover things like reading to and from files, parsing the content of files, and doing shit with the content.

Here are a few Python courses/tutorial collections you can check out. You don’t need to do all of them, but I wanted to give you some options so you’re more likely to find one that you vibe with:

• w3schools Python tutorial
• official Python tutorial
• Python Basics: Introduction to Python - this is one of Real Python’s “learning paths” which are structured like a full-on course
• I/O Operations and String Formatting - another course from Real Python. Goes more in depth on this particular topic and I would recommend this after learning the basics from one of the other resources I’ve mentioned.

EDIT: Btw, you are definitly not limited to using Python for this. Lot’s of other programming language will do. You just mentioned it, so I ran with that, haha.