Live weather, right where your team starts the day — personalised per user, zero configuration overhead.
Your RT dashboard is the first thing your team sees every morning. With RT-Extension-WeatherWidget, every user gets an instant glance at the weather for their location — pulled automatically from the City / Zip / Country fields already stored in their RT profile. No browser permission prompts. No per-user setup. No API keys to manage. Just open your dashboard and the weather is there.
The Weather widget blends seamlessly into any RT 6 dashboard — clean, compact, and always in the right language.
RT is a powerful platform, but out of the box its dashboards are purely functional. WeatherWidget is part of a broader effort to make RT a place people enjoy working in — not just a queue manager, but a thoughtful workspace. Knowing the weather at a glance helps teams plan field visits, prepare for commutes, and simply feel that their tools care about them as people.
- Profile-driven location — reads City, Zip and Country directly from the logged-in RT user's profile; every team member automatically sees their own local weather
- No API key required — weather data comes from Open-Meteo (free, EU-hosted, GDPR-friendly); geocoding via Nominatim / OpenStreetMap
- Rich condition display — 25 WMO weather codes mapped to labels and emoji icons
- Fully localised — widget title adapts to the user's RT language setting (DE, EN, FR, ES, IT, NL, PT, RU, JA, ZH, PL, SV and more)
- Theme-aware — adapts to RT's light, dark and custom themes (Elevator, KN, Terminal) using Bootstrap CSS variables
- 30-minute cache — results are stored in
sessionStorage; navigating between RT pages does not trigger redundant API calls - Manual refresh — a ↻ button lets users force an immediate update
- Friendly empty state — if a user has no location in their profile, the widget shows a direct link to their preferences page instead of a blank or broken card
- HTMX-safe — fully compatible with RT 6's HTMX page navigation
RT User Profile (City / Zip / Country)
│ Mason reads at render time
▼
JavaScript receives location as variables
│
├─▶ Nominatim API → lat / lon
│
└─▶ Open-Meteo API → current weather
│
▼
Widget renders with emoji + temperature + condition
Compact info row: location · feels like · wind · humidity
Result cached 30 min in sessionStorage
No geolocation permission prompt. No server-side HTTP calls. The browser fetches weather data directly from public APIs using coordinates derived from the user's RT profile.
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Request Tracker | 5.0.0 – 6.x |
| Perl | 5.10+ |
| RT user profiles | City and/or Zip + Country must be filled in |
| Browser | Modern browser with Fetch API |
| Network | Browser needs outbound HTTPS to api.open-meteo.com, geocoding-api.open-meteo.com, nominatim.openstreetmap.org |
git clone https://github.com/yourname/RT-Extension-WeatherWidget.git
cd RT-Extension-WeatherWidgetperl Makefile.PL
make
sudo make installInstalls into
/opt/rt6/local/plugins/RT-Extension-WeatherWidget/.
Add to /opt/rt6/etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm:
Plugin('RT::Extension::WeatherWidget');Set($HomepageComponents, [qw(
WeatherWidget ClockWidget
QuickCreate QueueList MyReminders Dashboards
# ... your existing components
)]);Set(%WeatherWidgetOptions,
TemperatureUnit => 'celsius', # or 'fahrenheit'
);sudo systemctl stop apache2
sudo rm -rf /opt/rt6/var/mason_data/obj/*
sudo systemctl start apache2Each user needs City and/or Zip and Country filled in their RT profile:
Admin path: Admin → Users → [select user] → General tab
Self-service path: Preferences → About Me
The widget reads these fields at page render time — no further action needed.
If a user has no location data, the widget displays a friendly message with a direct link to their preferences page.
- Open a dashboard and click Edit
- Find Weather (or the localised title) in the available portlets list
- Drag into any column and Save
The widget title is automatically displayed in the language the user has selected in their RT preferences. Bundled translations:
| Language | Title |
|---|---|
| English | Weather |
| Deutsch | Wetter |
| Français | Météo |
| Español | Tiempo |
| Italiano | Meteo |
| Nederlands | Weer |
| Português | Tempo |
| Русский | Погода |
| 日本語 | 天気 |
| 中文 | 天气 |
| Polski | Pogoda |
| Svenska | Väder |
Additional languages can be added by placing a .po file in the po/ directory.
The widget adapts automatically to all standard RT 6 themes:
| Theme | Light | Dark |
|---|---|---|
| Elevator | White card, Bootstrap defaults | Dark navy card |
| KN | White card, navy accent | Deep navy card rgba(0,34,68,0.95) |
| Terminal | Muted green card #edf5e8 |
Near-black #0a1a0a, phosphor green text |
| Condition | Example codes |
|---|---|
| ☀️ Sunny / Clear | 0, 1 |
| ⛅ Partly cloudy | 2 |
| ☁️ Overcast | 3 |
| 🌫️ Fog | 45, 48 |
| 🌧️ Rain / Drizzle | 51–67 |
| ❄️ Snow | 71–77 |
| 🌦️ Showers | 80–86 |
| ⛈️ Thunderstorm | 95–99 |
| 🌙 Clear night | 0 (is_day=0) |
RT-Extension-WeatherWidget/
├── Makefile.PL # Module::Install::RTx build script
├── Changes # Changelog
├── README.md # This file
├── screenshot.png # Dashboard screenshot
├── MANIFEST.SKIP # Exclusion list for make dist
├── po/ # Localisation files
│ ├── en.po de.po fr.po es.po
│ ├── it.po nl.po pt_BR.po ru.po
│ ├── ja.po zh_CN.po pl.po sv.po
├── etc/
│ └── WeatherWidget_Config.pm.sample # Sample RT_SiteConfig snippet
├── lib/
│ └── RT/
│ └── Extension/
│ └── WeatherWidget.pm # Perl module (version, POD)
└── html/
└── Elements/
└── WeatherWidget # Mason component (HTML + CSS + JS)
| API | Purpose | Cost | Privacy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open-Meteo | Weather data | Free, no key | EU-hosted, no tracking |
| Nominatim | City → lat/lon | Free | OpenStreetMap data |
Both APIs are called from the user's browser, not from the RT server. No data leaves the user's browser to any third party beyond these two geocoding/weather APIs.
See Changes.
GNU General Public License v2 — https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Torsten Brumm