🔨 Setup#

You will need a Synoptic account and API token to request data.

  1. Visit Synoptic’s Welcome page to register for an account.

  2. Navigate to your Synoptic Data Credentials and find your public tokens. You can generate a new token under the “Manage Tokens” tab, if needed.

  3. Copy a public token (not your key!).

Using Your Token in SynopticPy#

Whenever you query data from Synoptic’s Weather API, you need to provide your public token. You can specify this token in SynopticPy in three ways, listed in order of priority:

  1. Set the SYNOPTIC_TOKEN environment variable with your token;

  2. Configure a ~/.config/SynopticPy/config.toml file with your token;

  3. Set the token= argument when using any synoptic.services class.

1. Environment Variable#

SynopticPy first looks for your token in the SYNOPTIC_TOKEN environment variable.

For Linux users, you can add the following line to your .bashrc, .profile, or another shell configuration file:

export SYNOPTIC_TOKEN="yourToken123456789"

2. SynopticPy config file#

You can create a SynopticPy configuration file and set your token with the following Python code:

import synoptic
synoptic.configure(token="yourToken123456789")

This creates a new file ~/.config/SynopticPy/config.toml file with your token. Restart your Python instance, and the next time you import synoptic it will use the token value stored in the config.toml file.

3. Provide the token as an argument#

Lastly, you can directly provide the token when instantiating any synoptic.services class:

import synoptic
df = synoptic.Metadata(
    stid='WBB',
    token="yourToken123456789"
).df()

How to check the default token value#

You can check the default token SynopticPy is using with the following:

import synoptic
synoptic.services.TOKEN

Which will print your token and the source. It will look like one of the following:

🎫 Synoptic API token: yourToken123456789 (environment variable)

🎫 Synoptic API token: yourToken123456789 (config file)

🎫 Synoptic API token: None (not configured)