Aurora Weather is a Next.js App Router weather dashboard styled with Aurora Core, running live at weather.justinreda.com. It pulls forecast and geocoding data from Open-Meteo — no API key, no signup — and deploys to Vercel’s free tier with zero configuration: no auth, no database, no server-side state, no secrets.
Why it exists
Every weather app I tried was either an ad farm or a subscription. I wanted a clean, fast dashboard in the same visual language as the rest of my tools — and a proof that the Aurora Core design system translates to a data-dense, real-time surface: gold for the current-conditions hero, amber for caution, purple for forecast layers, Space Mono for the numbers.
Highlights
- Current conditions hero with feels-like temperature, humidity, and a wind arrow rotated to the actual bearing.
- 10-day daily forecast plus an hourly strip that auto-scrolls to a “Now” anchor.
- Live sunrise/sunset countdown that ticks every minute.
- Precipitation hints — “next chance” and “drying up” — computed over a 72-hour window.
- Browser geolocation resolved to a friendly city name via the IANA timezone, with no reverse-geocoding service.
- Search that understands ZIP codes, prefixes, and “City ST” forms; last city and °F/°C preference persist in localStorage.
Technical approach
The browser never talks to Open-Meteo directly: all requests proxy through Next.js route handlers with a 15-minute server-side revalidation cache, which keeps upstream traffic low and hides the origin. Aurora Core’s CSS is the copied source of truth, imported once globally, with nine Aurora components ported to React. The same codebase builds natively on Vercel and as a standalone multi-stage Docker image for self-hosting.
