In this task you will be doing the prep. work for building a Discord weather bot.
Your bot will allow a user to set their city with a !setCity [city name here] command and then get a weather report using !getWeather command which will show the current weather for their city.
In order to retrieve weather data for a user, your bot will need to communicate with an API.
An API is a way to integrate your application with another application. In this case, you will be using the OpenWeatherMap API which will provide weather data to integrate with your bot.
Similarly, your bot communicates with the Discord API to listen and respond to messages a Discord user sends.
APIs are a powerful concept which you can use to build an application - they are available for most things you can think of. From providing Fruit related data to Valorant skins/maps/game mode data.
This short video is a good overview on the concept of APIs.
The OpenWeatherMap API is a REST based API which means you communicate to it using HTTP "endpoints" - "endpoint" is just a fancy word for a url.
HTTP endpoints accept different methods such as "GET", "POST", "PUT" and "DELETE".
Since you want to retrieve weather data you will be using the "GET" method (which is the default method when a browser hits an URL).
The OpenWeatherMap API provides an endpoint which you will use to find the current weather data for a city: https://openweathermap.org/current
Try out the city endpoint url in your browser, replacing {city name} with a city name of your choice. See what the result is.
You should have noticed an error mentioning an invalid API key.
API keys are used by some APIs to protect data as to only allow people with a key to access data.
Sign up for an API key and then wait for 15 mins.
After 15 mins, revist the url but this time replace {API key} with the API key provided.
You should now see some meaningful data in a JSON format. JSON is an important but easy-to-understand concept, watch this short video for a good explanation.