Automate Weather Forecast Emails with Python, Jinja2, and Crontab

It's been a while since I wrote a blog, so I record the Python script that sends a QQ email on a schedule.

Use the requests library to call the Heweather weather‑forecast API and retrieve the data.

Create an HTML template with jinja2 to display the weather information.

Build the email using Python's email module and send it through smtplib .

Schedule the script with crontab so it runs automatically each night.

Heweather API

The API itself is straightforward: use requests to fetch the JSON, then extract the fields you need as described in the official documentation.

HTML Template

Write a Jinja2 template file in the same directory as the script.

After the template is ready, import it in the script and pass the weather data to render the final HTML.

Email Construction and Sending

Note:

1. Enable SMTP service in your QQ mailbox (usually port 465).

2. When constructing the email, the recipient address must be a string; when sending, it must be a list.

Crontab Scheduling

Typical crontab entry to run the script at 22:00 each night:

Common pitfalls:

Specify the full path to python3 (check with which python3).

If the script contains Chinese characters, set the environment variable, e.g., export LANG="zh_CN.UTF-8".

Avoid using if __name__ == '__main__' unless you have classes that need it.

Example crontab entry (shown as an image):

Email Preview

Source Code