Creating a module

This tutorial will demonstrate to developers how to create a Zimagi module. As an example, we will create a module that obtains data from a public data source provided by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This module is available in a public GitHub repository at:

https://github.com/zimagi/module-noaa-stations

Our module development will be performed locally, which provides an interactive environment for enhancing and testing feature as they are added.

The example we will work through utilizes a large collection of CSV files, each of which is regular in form. At a particular URL, there are subdirectories named as years, and within each of those directories are many individual CSV files, each containing information about data from one weather station during that year.

Inside each of these CSV files, rows contain a mixture of information about the station itself, such as its name, altitude and latitude, and information about the observation, such as temperature, humidity, visibility, precipitation, and so on.

For comparison, you may want to look at comparisons with a standalone script written for a similar purpose.