Getting the location from an IP address [duplicate]

Answer 1

There 2 broad approaches to perform IP geolocation: one is to download a dataset, host it on your infrastructure and maintain it up-to-date. This requires time and effort, especially if you need to support a high number of requests. Another solution is to use an existing API service that manages all the work for you and more.

There exist many API Geolocation services: Maxmind, Ip2location, Ipstack, IpInfo, etc. Recently, the company I work for has switched to Ipregistry (https://ipregistry.co) and I was involved in the decision and implementation process. Here are some elements you should consider while looking for an IP geolocation API:

• Is the service accurate? are they using a single source of information?
• Can they really handle your load?
• Do they provide consistent and fast response times Worldwide (except if your users are country specific)?
• What's their pricing model?

Here is an example to get IP geolocation information (but also threat and user agent data using one call):

$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$details = json_decode(file_get_contents("https://api.ipregistry.co/{$ip}?key=tryout"));
echo $details->location;

Note: I am not here to promote Ipregistry and say it's the best but I spent a long time analyzing existing solutions and their solution is really promising.

Answer 2

I like the free GeoLite City from Maxmind which works for most applications and from which you can upgrade to a paying version if it's not precise enough. There is a PHP API included, as well as for other languages. And if you are running Lighttpd as a webserver, you can even use a module to get the information in the SERVER variable for every visitor if that's what you need.

I should add there is also a free Geolite Country (which would be faster if you don't need to pinpoint the city the IP is from) and Geolite ASN (if you want to know who owns the IP) and that finally all these are downloadable on your own server, are updated every month and are pretty quick to lookup with the provided APIs as they state "thousands of lookups per second".

Answer 3

The following is a modified version of a snippet I found that uses http://ipinfodb.com/ip_locator.php to get its information. Keep in mind, you can also apply for an API key with them and use the API directly to get the information supplied as you see fit.

Snippet

function detect_location($ip=NULL, $asArray=FALSE) {
    if (empty($ip)) {
        if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'])) { $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP']; }
        elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'])) { $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']; }
        else { $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; }
    }
    elseif (!is_string($ip) || strlen($ip) < 1 || $ip == '127.0.0.1' || $ip == 'localhost') {
        $ip = '8.8.8.8';
    }

    $url = 'http://ipinfodb.com/ip_locator.php?ip=' . urlencode($ip);
    $i = 0; $content; $curl_info;

    while (empty($content) && $i < 5) {
        $ch = curl_init();
        $curl_opt = array(
            CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => 1,
            CURLOPT_HEADER => 0,
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  => 1,
            CURLOPT_URL => $url,
            CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 1,
            CURLOPT_REFERER => 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],
        );
        if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) $curl_opt[CURLOPT_USERAGENT] = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
        curl_setopt_array($ch, $curl_opt);
        $content = curl_exec($ch);
        if (!is_null($curl_info)) $curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
    }

    $araResp = array();
    if (preg_match('{<li>City : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['city'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>State/Province : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['state'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>Country : ([^<]*)}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['country'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>Zip or postal code : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['zip'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>Latitude : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['latitude'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>Longitude : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['longitude'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>Timezone : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['timezone'] = trim($regs[1]);
    if (preg_match('{<li>Hostname : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs)) $araResp['hostname'] = trim($regs[1]);

    $strResp = ($araResp['city'] != '' && $araResp['state'] != '') ? ($araResp['city'] . ', ' . $araResp['state']) : 'UNKNOWN';

    return $asArray ? $araResp : $strResp;
}

To Use

detect_location();
//  returns "CITY, STATE" based on user IP

detect_location('xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx');
//  returns "CITY, STATE" based on IP you provide

detect_location(NULL, TRUE);    //   based on user IP
//  returns array(8) { ["city"] => "CITY", ["state"] => "STATE", ["country"] => "US", ["zip"] => "xxxxx", ["latitude"] => "xx.xxxxxx", ["longitude"] => "-xx.xxxxxx", ["timezone"] => "-07:00", ["hostname"] => "xx-xx-xx-xx.host.name.net" }

detect_location('xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx', TRUE);   //   based on IP you provide
//  returns array(8) { ["city"] => "CITY", ["state"] => "STATE", ["country"] => "US", ["zip"] => "xxxxx", ["latitude"] => "xx.xxxxxx", ["longitude"] => "-xx.xxxxxx", ["timezone"] => "-07:00", ["hostname"] => "xx-xx-xx-xx.host.name.net" }

Answer 4

I've created a wrapper for ipinfo.io. You can install it using composer.

You can use it in this way:

$ipInfo = new DavidePastore\Ipinfo\Ipinfo();

//Get all the properties
$host = $ipInfo->getFullIpDetails("8.8.8.8");

//Read all the properties
$city = $host->getCity();
$country = $host->getCountry();
$hostname = $host->getHostname();
$ip = $host->getIp();
$loc = $host->getLoc();
$org = $host->getOrg();
$phone = $host->getPhone();
$region = $host->getRegion();

Answer 5

I wrote a bot using an API from ipapi.co, here's how you can get location for an IP address (e.g. 1.2.3.4) in php :

Set header :

$opts = array('http'=>array('method'=>"GET", 'header'=>"User-Agent: mybot.v0.7.1"));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);

Get JSON response

echo file_get_contents('https://ipapi.co/1.2.3.4/json/', false, $context);

of get a specific field (country, timezone etc.)

echo file_get_contents('https://ipapi.co/1.2.3.4/country/', false, $context);

Answer 6

Assuming you want to do it yourself and not rely upon other providers, IP2Nation provides a MySQL database of the mappings which are updated as the regional registries change things around.