wview-rrd - Interactive RRDTool graphs for weewx/wview weather stations
wview-rrd updates Round Robin Database files from a local weewx or wview SQLite database file. cgi-bin/weather then generates interactive graphs of the weather data from these RRD files to a web browser.
Features of the CGI web interface include:
- show all weather variables in high resolution time series graphs
- change displayed units, with configurable defaults
- zoom the displayed time frame: year, month, week, day, hour, custom
- scroll the displayed time frame of the graphs left/right
- change graph plot size (width x height)
- change data resolution - detailed, hourly, daily and so on
- at wider resolutions, show average line in min/max area
- add graphs of extra sensor data
- show (min < avg < max) last, of plotted data in the legend
- show many times of a graph at once (just click a graph)
- export the data of any graph to csv, xml, json or see RRD code
- all widgets / links have mouse balloon tooltip clues
Install the data presentation and updater code:
cp etc/wview-rrd.pl to /etc and edit as needed
edit cgi-bin/weather.pl config file as needed
cp -p cgi-bin/* to your web server's cgi-bin/ directory
cp -p bin/* to /usr/bin/
cp -p user/* /etc/weewx/bin/user/ # FOR WEEWX ONLY, NEW versions
cp -p user/* /usr/share/weewx/user/ # FOR WEEWX ONLY, old versions
http://localhost/cgi-bin/weather should now show an interface, but with broken graphs since the RRD files don't yet exist. Click y and << a couple times to zoom out to a 4 year view. You can refresh this in a moment to see the data coming in as you run the data collector.
These graphs track accumulated rain per year, automatically resetting to 0 at the beginning of each year. So, you can optionally find out how many inches of rain you had in the year up to the start date of your station. This needs passed to wview-rrd when it first generates the RRD files. If you don't know, the default value is 0.
Run as root, passing starting inches of rain as the only argument:
wview-rrd 6.17 # where "6.17" is inches of rain to start, or 0
Be patient - this first run will take a while as all your station data is stored in the RRD files. Refresh the weather URL above to see the data coming in. Confirm 3 RRD files are created in the database directory, along side the weewx.sdb or wview-archive.sdb source file. After finished, run wview-rrd again and it should complete much faster as it adds only new data.
To set up automated updates of the RRD files:
FOR WEEWX: append the new user service to one line of weewx.conf:
< archive_services = weewx.engine.StdArchive
> archive_services = weewx.engine.StdArchive, user.updaterrd.UpdateRRD
then /etc/init.d/weewx restart
FOR WVIEW: add one line to /etc/wview/post-generate.sh:
wview-rrd > /tmp/wview-rrd.log 2>&1 &
RRD files should now update immediately after the database. A simple rm *.rrd can recreate them at any time. Remove and regenerate is needed only if you have edited data in the source database.
The screenshot in the source etc/weather.png shows the control header and four graphs. The legends show "(min < avg < max) last" of the metrics for the displayed time. The wind graph shows a wind change from south to north in the color below 0.
It is NOT recommended to put this on the internet.
RRDTool is very efficient at generating images on-the-fly and the CGI makes a nice interactive interface. This works well for the expected case of real users checking the weather. But if an evil botnet gets the URL and runs this dozens of times per second, this could consume your server or network bandwidth.
Yes, DDoS happened to me. If you put this on the internet, please rename the cgi-bin/weather (and its config file) so the URL can't be guessed and then do NOT publish the URL anywhere.
rrdtool(1), http://weewx.com/
Timothy D Witham twitham@sbcglobal.net
Copyright 2012-2026 Timothy D Witham.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.