mmdb_country

Returns the country name for a given IP address.

Based in no small part on the mmdblookup program from https://github.com/maxmind/libmaxminddb

Dependencies

Before building, you'll need to fetch the libmaxminddb library.

Ubuntu via PPA

MaxMind provides a PPA for recent version of Ubuntu. To add the PPA to your APT sources, run:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maxmind/ppa

Then install the packages by running:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install libmaxminddb0

Mac via Homebrew

You can install libmaxminddb on macOS using Homebrew:

$ brew install libmaxminddb

Building

make

Usage

$ mmdb_country --file /path/to/file.mmdb --ip 1.2.3.4
Australia

This application returns the country associated with an IP. It accepts the following options:

--file (-f)     The path to the MMDB file. Required.
--ip (-i)       The IP address to look up. Required.
--help (-h -?)  Show this usage information.

Getting the MaxMind DB

This program should work equally well with the commercial licenced GeoIP2 (higher accuracy/paid) or GeoLite2 (lower accuracy/free) datasets. Given we're just looking at country, the decision over which dataset to use will likely come down to how you plan to use the data.

Such as https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geolite2-free-geolocation-data?lang=en

The Country based dataset (in mmdb format) would be the most appropriate. The City dataset will work, but it is more than 10 times the size (although the runtime seem to be pretty much the same for both).