geoip-lite-country

A native NodeJS API for the GeoLite data from MaxMind.

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://maxmind.com/ It is a simplified version of https://www.npmjs.com/package/geoip-lite that only includes country data.

Usage

var geoip = require('geoip-lite-country-only');

var ip = "207.97.227.239";
var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);

console.log(geo);
{
  country: 'US'
}

installation

1. get the library

$ npm install geoip-lite-country-only

2. update the datafiles (optional)

Run npm run-script updatedb to update the data files.

NOTE that this requires a lot of RAM. It is known to fail on on a Digital Ocean or AWS micro instance. There are no plans to change this. geoip-lite-country stores all data in RAM in order to be fast.

API

geoip-lite is completely synchronous. There are no callbacks involved. All blocking file IO is done at startup time, so all runtime calls are executed in-memory and are fast. Startup may take up to 200ms while it reads into memory and indexes data files.

Looking up an IP address

If you have an IP address in dotted quad notation, IPv6 colon notation, or a 32 bit unsigned integer (treated as an IPv4 address), pass it to the lookup method. Note that you should remove any [ and ] around an IPv6 address before passing it to this method.

var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);

If the IP address was found, the lookup method returns an object with the following structure:

{
   country: 'XX',                 // 2 letter ISO-3166-1 country code
}

If the IP address was not found, the lookup returns null

Start and stop watching for data updates

If you have a server running geoip-lite-country, and you want to update its geo data without a restart, you can enable the data watcher to automatically refresh in-memory geo data when a file changes in the data directory.

geoip.startWatchingDataUpdate();

This tool can be used with npm run-script updatedb to periodically update geo data on a running server.

Built-in Updater

This package contains an update script that can pull the files from MaxMind and handle the conversion from CSV. A npm script alias has been setup to make this process easy. Please keep in mind this requires internet and MaxMind rate limits that amount of downloads on their servers.

npm run-script updatedb

You can also run it by doing:

node ./node_modules/geoip-lite/scripts/updatedb.js

Or, if you really want, run the update once by require('geoip-lite-country-only/scripts/updatedb.js').

Caveats

This package includes the GeoLite database from MaxMind. This database is not the most accurate database available, however it is the best available for free. You can use the commercial GeoIP database from MaxMind with better accuracy by buying a license from MaxMind, and then using the conversion utility to convert it to a format that geoip-lite understands. You will need to use the .csv files from MaxMind for conversion.

Also note that on occassion, the library may take up to 5 seconds to load into memory. This is largely dependent on how busy your disk is at that time. It can take as little as 200ms on a lightly loaded disk. This is a one time cost though, and you make it up at run time with very fast lookups.

References

• Documentation from MaxMind
• ISO 3166 (1 & 2) codes
• FIPS region codes

Copyright

geoip-lite-country is Copyright 2017-2018 David Ventura davidventura3@gmail.com and the latest version of the code is available at https://github.com/mubraska/node-geoip

License

There are two licenses for the code and data. See the LICENSE file for details.