feat: Fallback to user's IP geolocation for weather

knadh / dns.toys

A DNS server that offers useful utilities and services over the DNS protocol. Weather, world time, unit conversion etc.

https://www.dns.toys

MIT License

2.49k stars 136 forks source link

feat: Fallback to user's IP geolocation for weather #29

Closed obviyus closed 2 years ago

obviyus commented 2 years ago

Hey, would it be okay if add a PR that adds a fallback for weather (much like https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in), making the location in <lolcation>.weather optional?

e.g.

$ dig +short weather @dns.toys

However, this would introduce a reliance on an external service(perhaps https://ip-api.com/). Or maybe a local database of entries? Let me know what you think!

knadh commented 2 years ago

I've thought about this, but I think the cons outweigh the minor inconvenience of not having to type the location once (after which, for most users, it's remembered and auto-completed in the terminal anyway).

Reliance on an another external API (on top of weather). There are no free GeoIP providers without big caveats. ip-api.com for instance has a 10k req/month limit.
When the limit hits, the service will have to stop doing GeoIP lookups, breaking consistency.
This is another synchronous network request to make on a DNS query.
There are no quality local GeoIP DBs. Any DB has to be updated periodically as well.

obviyus commented 2 years ago

Fair enough, no way to skirt around those. I'll close this issue then.