Send WeatherX alerts to Google Chat

Slack and Discord publish an approval flow: you press a button, their own screen asks which channel, and they hand us the address. Google gives no button for a space, so you make the address yourself inside Google Chat and send it to us once. It takes about five minutes, and after that this destination behaves exactly like the others.

Before you start

• Use a space, not a one-to-one chat. Webhooks only exist in spaces.
• Do it on a computer, in a browser. The phone app does not show this screen.
• You must be able to manage the space. If you cannot, ask whoever made it.

Where the setting lives

The steps

1. Open Google Chat in a browser and open the space that should get the alerts.

2. Click the space name at the top of the conversation. A menu drops down.

3. Choose Apps and integrations.

4. Choose Webhooks, then Add webhooks.

5. Name it WeatherX. The avatar box is optional — leave it empty. Press Save.

6. Google shows a long web address. Use its copy button rather than selecting the text by hand: the address is longer than the box, and a half-copied address fails silently.

   It looks like this, with real characters where the dots are:

   https://chat.googleapis.com/v1/spaces/…/messages?key=…&token=…

7. Send it to us. Write to support@weatherx.earth, paste the address in, and say which place it is for. We put it on that place and the next alert goes to the space. If you write code, the second half of this page does the same thing without waiting for us.

What arrives, and when

We look at your place every ten minutes. You get one message when weather is coming or has started, and one when it has passed. A quiet week is a quiet channel — nothing arrives to say that nothing is happening.

The first line is the decision: STOP means it is at the place now or within twenty minutes, PREPARE means it is coming, ALL CLEAR means it has passed.

The last line of every message points back at this page. It is a link to a manual and not a switch: opening it changes nothing, so an alert that is forwarded, quoted or read by a spam filter carries nothing anybody can act on.

What changes on our side

• The place named in your email gets one destination: your Google Chat space.
• Alerts for that place go there from the next ten-minute cycle. Nothing else about your account moves.
• Your API key is not touched. It never travels in any of these links.
• You can have more than one destination on a place. Add another and both receive every alert.

If something is wrong

• No “Apps and integrations” in the menu. You are in a one-to-one chat, not a space, or you cannot manage this space.
• No “Webhooks” inside it. Your Google Workspace administrator has turned webhooks off for the organisation. Only they can turn it back on.
• Nothing arrives. First: has there been any weather? We only write when there is something to say. If there has been, the address was probably cut short when it was copied — make a new webhook and send us the address again.
• It went to the wrong space. Each address belongs to one space. Make one in the right space and send us that.

How to stop it

Delete the webhook in the same screen — that stops the messages at once, from Google's side. Then take the destination off our side too — below — so we stop sending to an address that is no longer there.

How to stop everything, without asking anybody

Your WeatherX email carries a Stop link at the bottom. Open it, and press the button on the page it shows. It stops every alert for that place and turns off every destination on it, at any hour. It needs no key and no reply.

Write to support@weatherx.earth, and ask us to take one destination off and leave the rest running.

Everything here needs your API key

Send it as an X-API-Key header. It is the key from your welcome message, and it never travels in a connect link — the two are separate on purpose.

Send yourself a real alert, now

You do not have to wait for weather. One call sends a real alert through the real senders:

POST /portal/sites/<place id>/test
X-API-Key: wx_live_…

It arrives as light rain half an hour away, and it says on its face that it is a test — in the first line of the message — so nobody can mistake it for weather. One a minute, twenty a day.

Take one destination off, and leave the rest

The Stop link above turns off everything at once. This takes off one and leaves the place watched. Ask for the list, then delete the one you mean:

GET /portal/sites/<place id>/channels
DELETE /portal/channels/<id>
X-API-Key: wx_live_…

Everything else on that place carries on receiving.

There is no API call for this one

A Google Chat space still has to be sent to us by hand, and that is a real limit rather than a step we left out. The public call that registers an address, POST /portal/sites/<id>/channels/webhook, stores it as an ordinary webhook — and an ordinary webhook is sent raw JSON with signing headers, which a Google Chat space will not show as a message. So a space address given to that call would be accepted and would then post nothing anybody can read.

Write to support@weatherx.earth with the address and the place, as the steps above say. We set it as a Google Chat destination, which is a different kind of row, and it renders properly.

The message as fields, not sentences

This destination receives the alert written out as sentences, because a person reads it. A program usually wants the numbers instead — how far away, which direction, how far ahead the forecast was. That is a second destination kind, and it has its own page: alerts to your own server. A place can carry both at once.