Getting a user country name from originating IP address with Ruby on Rails

Question

I want to extract a user country name from visitors\' IP addresses.

I could get the IP address with remote_ip. But what could be the easiest way to get

Answer 1

The gem geoip can be replaced with the new gem maxminddb. It support new MaxMind db format.

db = MaxMindDB.new('./GeoLite2-City.mmdb')
ret = db.lookup('74.125.225.224')

ret.found? # => true
ret.country.name # => 'United States'
ret.country.name('zh-CN') # => '美国'
ret.country.iso_code # => 'US'
ret.city.name(:fr) # => 'Mountain View'
ret.subdivisions.most_specific.name # => 'California'
ret.location.latitude # => -122.0574

Answer 2

Try the IP2Location Ruby

https://github.com/ip2location/ip2location-ruby

Pre-requisite

Download the free LITE database from http://lite.ip2location.com/ and use below.

Install

gem install ip2location_ruby

Usage

require 'ip2location_ruby'

i2l = Ip2location.new.open("./data/IP-COUNTRY-SAMPLE.BIN")
record = i2l.get_all('8.8.8.8')

print 'Country Code: ' + record.country_short + "\n"
print 'Country Name: ' + record.country_long + "\n"
print 'Region Name: ' + record.region + "\n"
print 'City Name: ' + record.city + "\n"
print 'Latitude: '
print record.latitude
print "\n"
print 'Longitude: '
print record.longitude
print "\n"
print 'ISP: ' + record.isp + "\n"
print 'Domain: ' + record.domain + "\n"
print 'Net Speed: ' + record.netspeed + "\n"
print 'Area Code: ' + record.areacode + "\n"
print 'IDD Code: ' + record.iddcode + "\n"
print 'Time Zone: ' + record.timezone + "\n"
print 'ZIP Code: ' + record.zipcode + "\n"
print 'Weather Station Code: ' + record.weatherstationname + "\n"
print 'Weather Station Name: ' + record.weatherstationcode + "\n"
print 'MCC: ' + record.mcc + "\n"
print 'MNC: ' + record.mnc + "\n"
print 'Mobile Name: ' + record.mobilebrand + "\n"
print 'Elevation: '
print record.elevation
print "\n"
print 'Usage Type: ' + record.usagetype + "\n"

Answer 3

I'm using this one-liner:

locale = Timeout::timeout(5) { Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse('http://api.hostip.info/country.php?ip=' + request.remote_ip )).body } rescue "US"

Answer 4

The simplest is to use an existing web service for this.

There are plugins that let you do much more, including making your models geolocation-aware (geokit-rails) automatically, but if all you need is a country code for example, simply sending an HTTP Get to http://api.hostip.info/country.php (there are other services but this one does not require an API key) will return it, e.g. :

Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse('http://api.hostip.info/country.php'))
=> US

Or polling http://api.hostip.info/ will return a full XML response with city, latitude, longitude, etc.

Be aware that the results you get are not 100% accurate. For example, right now I'm in France but reported as in Germany. This will be the case for pretty much any IP-based service.

Answer 5

I've just published a gem for the IPLocate.io API which I created.

Super easy, no databases to download, and 1,500 free requests per day:

require 'iplocate'

# Look up an IP address
results = IPLocate.lookup("8.8.8.8")

# Or with an API key
results = IPLocate.lookup("8.8.8.8", "abcdef")

results["country"]
# "United States"

results["country_code"]
# "US"

results["org"]
# "Google LLC"

results.inspect
# {
#   "ip"=>"8.8.8.8",
#   "country"=>"United States",
#   "country_code"=>"US",
#   "city"=>nil,
#   "continent"=>"North America",
#   "latitude"=>37.751,
#   "longitude"=>-97.822,
#   "time_zone"=>nil,
#   "postal_code"=>nil,
#   "org"=>"Google LLC",
#   "asn"=>"AS15169"
# }  

No Gem

It can also be used without a gem by just using Ruby's Net::HTTP and URI:

response = Net::HTTP.get( URI.parse( "https://www.iplocate.io/api/lookup/8.8.8.8" ) )

The request will return JSON so you can parse it and access it as follows:

country = JSON.parse( response )["country"]
# => "US"