Web · Beginner
SkyCast: Live Weather Dashboard
Build a responsive dashboard that geolocates the user, fetches a live forecast API, and renders 7-day charts with loading and error states.
SkyCast is a browser-based weather dashboard that uses the Geolocation API to detect the user's coordinates, then calls the free Open-Meteo forecast API to retrieve a 7-day hourly and daily forecast. You will render temperature, precipitation, and wind speed trends as interactive charts using Recharts, all inside a clean Tailwind-styled layout. This project gives you hands-on practice with async data fetching, component state management, and graceful loading and error handling, skills that appear in virtually every real-world frontend role.
What you build
- Automatically geolocates the user on page load and requests coordinates via the browser Geolocation API
- Fetches a live 7-day weather forecast from Open-Meteo with no API key required
- Displays current conditions (temperature, wind speed, precipitation probability) in a summary card
- Renders daily high/low temperature trends as a responsive line chart using Recharts
- Shows precipitation probability as a bar chart across the forecast window
- Handles loading skeleton states and user-friendly error messages when geolocation or the network fails
- Supports manual city search as a fallback using Open-Meteo geocoding endpoint
What it teaches
- Consuming a REST JSON API with TypeScript-typed fetch and handling async state (loading, error, success) in React
- Using the browser Geolocation API and managing permission states in a custom hook
- Rendering data-driven charts with Recharts including responsive containers, tooltips, and legends
- Structuring a Vite and React project with a clean separation of hooks, lib utilities, and UI components
- Applying Tailwind CSS utility classes to build a responsive multi-column dashboard layout
- Writing robust error boundaries and user-facing error messages for network and permission failures
How it works
- 1
Geolocation API
- Browser requests lat/lon
- User grants or denies permission
- 2
Open-Meteo Fetch
- GET /v1/forecast?latitude=...&longitude=...
- Returns JSON with daily and hourly arrays
- 3
State Management
- React state holds loading / error / data
- Custom hook exposes typed forecast object
- 4
Chart Rendering
- Recharts LineChart for temperature
- Recharts BarChart for precipitation
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Take it further
- Add a unit toggle (Celsius / Fahrenheit) that converts values client-side without a new API call, persisting the preference to localStorage.
- Integrate a UV index and sunrise/sunset display using the additional Open-Meteo daily fields, and animate the chart entry with Recharts animation props.
- Cache the last successful forecast response in localStorage with a timestamp so the app shows stale data gracefully when the user is offline.
