vicalerts 0.3.0

Track & archive Victoria's live emergency alerts

VicAlerts

Track and archive VicEmergency incidents to a local SQLite database.

Purpose

VicAlerts polls the public VicEmergency GeoJSON feed, stores every version of every event, and exposes a small CLI for querying the result. Useful for incident timelines, post-event analysis, or keeping your own history for when events expire from the feed. It is designed to run 24/7 to collect data.

Installation

uv pip install vicalerts

Requires Python 3.10 or newer.

Quick start

# Continuous polling (60 s default)
vicalerts run

# One-off fetch (handy in cron)
vicalerts run --once

CLI reference

Command	Description	Key options
run	Poll feed and write to the DB	--once, --interval <seconds> (>=10), --db <path>, --no-progress
events	List events (active only by default)	--all, --type incident|warning, --status <text>, --category <text>, --limit <n>, --format table|json|csv, --db <path>
history <EVENT_ID>	Show full version history	--db <path>
stats	Print DB totals	--db <path>

All commands accept --help.

Defaults

Setting	Value
Feed URL	https://emergency.vic.gov.au/public/events-geojson.json
Interval	60 s
HTTP timeout	30 s
Retries	3 (1 s, then 2 s, then 4 s)
Database	./vicalerts.sqlite

Example workflows

# 1. Nightly stats
vicalerts stats --db /data/vic.sqlite

# 2. Export active incidents as JSON
vicalerts events --type incident --format json > incidents.json

# 3. Inspect how an event evolved
vicalerts history 123456 --db /data/vic.sqlite

Notes and limitations

• Disk growth is roughly 10–20 MB per month (feeds are compressed).
• Memory use is modest (< 50 MB typical).
• Geometry is reduced to centroids; polygons are not preserved.
• Tested on Linux and macOS; Windows untested.
• 60s interval is based on VicEmergency website; impact is no different to having the site open.

Attribution

Data © State of Victoria (EMV) - data licensed under CC BY 4.0 AU