Passing the IP then returning the country

Hi DP members and php master,

Is there any free or paid web services that can be used for geo location checking.
i want to pass the IP of the current visitor/user to a webservice/site then this will return give me the visitors country.

 

http://pecl.php.net/geoip

You will need maxmind GeoIP installed.

There is a free database/service.

On a lot of systems, this will get you going:

Where {pkgmanager} is yum, or apt-get

{pkgmanager} install GeoIP

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pecl install geoip

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echo "extension=geoip.so" > /etc/php.d/geoip.ini

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If you use php-fpm then

service php-fpm restart

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If you use nginx or apache, then execute

Where {httpd} is httpd, or nginx

service {httpd} restart

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You will need to add a cron job for monthly updates to the GeoIP.dat

 

Thanks Krakjoe for the prompt response. But i'm using a shared hosting, will they allow me to install it?

 

They have a pure PHP version of their API

http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/php/

 

Thanks krakjoe, anybody else having different implementation ?

 

There are other implementations that you can use on a shared server:

http://www.phpclasses.org/search.html?words=geoip&x=0&y=0&go_search=1

If you just want the country name/code, the first class listed by Marius seems sufficient.

 

Thanks ThePHPMaster saw the link you gave me

 

You can still use an API which is relatively fast if you can't afford to install the standalone db from maxmind. (http://freegeoip.net/{FORMAT}/{IP_OR_HOSTNAME})

Example : http://freegeoip.net/json/79.112.239.66 (csv, xml is available too)

JSON callbacks are supported by adding the callbackargument to the query string: http://freegeoip.net/json/79.112.239.66?callback=show which results into:

show({"city": "Vaslui", "region_code": "38", "region_name": "Vaslui", "metrocode": "", "zipcode": "", "longitude": "27.7333", "latitude": "46.6333", "country_code": "RO", "ip": "79.112.239.66", "country_name": "Romania"});

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