freegeoip.net

Info:	See github for the latest source.
Author:	Alexandre Fiori <fiorix@gmail.com>

About

This is the software running behind the IP Geolocation Web Service at freegeoip.net. The database is not shipped with the package. However, there are instructions for downloading and generating a local version of the database, using the database/createdb.py python script.

Using

The web service can deliver search results in three different formats: CSV, XML and JSON (with callbacks).

• For querying GeoIP information (using curl):

  curl http://freegeoip.net/csv/google.com
  curl http://freegeoip.net/xml/69.63.189.16
  curl http://freegeoip.net/json/74.200.247.59
  curl http://freegeoip.net/json/github.com?callback=doit
  

• For querying GeoIP information about your own IP:

  curl http://freegeoip.net/xml/
  

• For querying Timezone information (/tz/country_code/region_code):

  curl http://freegeoip.net/tz/xml/BR/27
  curl http://freegeoip.net/tz/json/US/10
  curl http://freegeoip.net/tz/json/CA/10?callback=doit
  

Running

For development:

export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
twistd -n freegeoip

For production, check out the scripts directory. There are init scripts for debian - single instance, or multiple instances for multi-core systems. I recommend load balancing with Nginx.

Requirements

• cyclone
• Python 2.5 or newer (but not 3.x)
• SQLite3 (usually ships with Python)
• Twisted 8.2 or newer

From the Command Line

I usually use the following in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc in order to easily query the geoip database from the Unix command line:

# geoip
function geoip_curl_xml { curl -D - http://freegeoip.net/xml/$1 }
alias geoip=geoip_curl_xml

Testing

Check out scripts/test.py.

Credits

Thanks to (in no particular order):

• google.com

  • Because it wouldn't look so good without the map

• twitter.com

  • Bootstrap makes dirty programmers feel like artists

• ipinfodb.com

  • For formely providing both GeoIP and Timezones database

• maxmind.com

  • For creating the database