How do I get weather working?

[jheath]

I see in the README that the new additions integrate somehow with Open Meteo and the Insights tab says weather requires the "Weather Plugin" to be active. However, I didn't see anywhere what needs to be done to install/enable this plugin.

[E-Wold]

I had a similar issue. Initially, none of the Insights sections worked for me. I got that fixed but the Weather section still wouldn't populate. This is what I did to fix Weather:

The Problem

The weather system works by running scripts/utils/weather.py once per hour via a cron job. It calls the free Open-Meteo API using your Pi's configured latitude/longitude and writes hourly temperature, conditions, wind speed, and wind direction into a weather table in your birds.db database. The cron template exists in the repo but was never added to the installer — so it just never runs.

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Fix — Run These on Your Pi

Step 1 — Run the weather script once right now to immediately populate the last 48 hours of data:

python3 ~/BirdNET-Pi/scripts/utils/weather.py

You should see output like:

INFO:weather:Hourly weather data synced successfully to birds.db.

If you instead see Latitude or Longitude not set, jump to the troubleshooting note below.

Step 2 — Install the hourly cron job so it keeps running automatically:

# Preview what will be added
cat ~/BirdNET-Pi/templates/weather.cron

# Add it to the system crontab
sudo bash -c "cat ~/BirdNET-Pi/templates/weather.cron | envsubst >> /etc/crontab"

Step 3 — Verify it was added:

grep -i weather /etc/crontab

You should see:

0 * * * * <youruser>  /usr/bin/python3 /home/<youruser>/BirdNET-Pi/scripts/utils/weather.py

Step 4 — Reload the cron service:

sudo systemctl restart cron

Then refresh the Insights > Weather page in your browser — it should now show data.

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Troubleshooting: If Step 1 Says Latitude/Longitude Not Set

The weather script pulls your coordinates from BirdNET-Pi's config file. Check what's stored:

grep -i "latitude\|longitude" ~/BirdNET-Pi/birdnet.conf

If those lines are empty or missing, set them via the web UI at Tools → Settings and enter your coordinates there, save, then re-run Step 1.

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Once the cron is running, it fills in the current day plus the previous day on every hourly run, so your Weather Correlations charts will gradually get richer as more detection+weather overlap accumulates in the database.

[jheath]

This worked for me. I appreciate the help!

[E-Wold]

If you are having the problem where none of the Insights sections are working, this may help you; it fixed it for me.

The Problem

views.php was trying to include('insights.php') — looking for it in the homepage/ folder — but the file actually lives at scripts/insights.php. All the other views added by this fork (Analytics, Species) correctly use the scripts/ prefix. Insights was simply missing it, causing PHP to silently include nothing, which is why you got a blank page with no error.

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Fix — Run These on Your Pi

SSH into your Pi and run:

cd ~/BirdNET-Pi

Then make the one-line fix:

sed -i "s|include('insights.php')|include('scripts/insights.php')|" homepage/views.php

Verify it looks right:

grep -n "insights" homepage/views.php

You should see:

515:  if($_GET['view'] == "Insights"){include('scripts/insights.php');}

No service restart is needed — PHP files are interpreted on each request, so the fix takes effect immediately. Just reload the Insights page in your browser and all seven sub-views (Dashboard, Behavior, Migration, Weather, Health, Trends & Forecasting, Reports) should appear.

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One heads-up: the Insights Dashboard's Yard Health Score and the Migration/Seasonality tab query your historical detection data pretty heavily. With a few days of data from your initial install, some sections will show limited results (the Migration tab needs ~14 days of history to flag "New Arrivals"), but everything should render rather than blank out.