Ruby GeoIP Bindings

What?

This is a library which provides a single function. The function takes as input an IP address and it outputs a hash containing best-guess geographical information (like city, country, latitude, and longitude).

Actually this is only a Ruby binding to a C library which provides this function. Also, you must download a large binary database with all this mapping information. It is kindly provided free of charge by MaxMind.com.

Usage

require 'geoip'
db = GeoIP::City.new('/opt/GeoIP/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat')
result = db.look_up('24.24.24.24')
p result 
# => {:city=>"Ithaca", 
#     :latitude=>42.4277992248535, 
#     :longitude=>-76.4981994628906, 
#     :country_code3=>"USA", 
#     :country_code=>"US",
#     :country_name=>"United States", 
#     :dma_code=>555,
#     :area_code=>607, 
#     :region=>"NY" }

There are arguments to database initializer.

1. The first argument is the filename of the GeoIPCity.dat file

2. The second argument (optional) is to specify how GeoIP should keep the database in memory. There are three possibilities

   • :filesystem -- Read database from filesystem, uses least memory.

   • :index -- The most frequently accessed index portion of the database, resulting in faster lookups than :filesystem, but less memory usage than :memory.

   • :memory -- (Default.) Load database into memory, faster performance but uses more memory.

3. The third argument is boolean and decides whether the system should reload the database if changes are made to the dat file. (You probably don't need this. Default: false.)

For example

GeoIP::City.new(dbfile, :filesystem, true)

Usage for Organization Search

require 'geoip'
db = GeoIP::Organization.new('/opt/GeoIP/share/GeoIP/GeoIPOrg.dat')
db.look_up('24.24.24.24')
# => {:name=>"Road Runner"}

The name is the only data available for Organizations.

Install

Some variation of the following should work.

1. Install the GeoCity C library. You can get it from MaxMind. For example, I like to install mine in /opt/GeoIP, so I do this:

   tar -zxvf GeoIP-1.4.3.tar.gz 
   cd GeoIP-1.4.3
   ./configure --prefix=/opt/GeoIP
   make && sudo make install
   

   On Mac OS X, you can install using MacPorts:

   sudo port install libgeoip
   

2. Now install the geoip gem

   gem install mtodd-geoip -s http://gems.github.com/ -- --with-geoip-dir=/opt/GeoIP
   

   Alternatively, if you installed libgeoip using MacPorts:

   env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install geoip-c -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local
   

3. Download the GeoLite City database file in binary format at http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity Maybe this direct link will work. I put this file in

   /opt/GeoIP/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat
   

   If you installed libgeoip using MacPorts then put it in:

   /opt/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat
   

   If you are a paying customer, you will download the files required below:

   MaxMind Customer Downloads

   You will want to get the City Rev1 data file and Organization files at minimum.

4. Use it!

   See above for usage details.

Hints

1. Might need to set

   export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386"
   

   to be able to compile the gem.

   Example:

   env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mtodd-geoip -s http://gems.github.com/ -- --with-geoip-dir=/opt/GeoIP
   

2. You might find this shell script helpful to install the C library.

Links

This iteration of the library is based on the hard work of Ryah Dahl (ry@tinyclouds.org). You can find the original RDocs and Git Repo below:

rdocs git repo

Thanks

Special appreciation and thanks belongs to Ry Dahl for his initial work on this library.

Many thanks to our contributors:

• Charles Brian Quinn
• Michael Sheakoski
• Silvio Quadri

License

Copyright (C) 2007--2009 Ryah Dahl (ry@tinyclouds.org), Matt Todd (mtodd@highgroove.com)

This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details.