Getting the location from an IP address

Question

I want to retrieve information like the city, state, and country of a visitor from their IP address, so that I can customize my web page according to their location. Is there a good and reliable way to do this in PHP? I am using JavaScript for client-side scripting, PHP for server-side scripting, and MySQL for the database.

Answer 1

I've created a wrapper for ipinfo.io. You can install it using composer.

You can use it in this way:

$ipInfo = new DavidePastore\Ipinfo\Ipinfo();

//Get all the properties
$host = $ipInfo->getFullIpDetails("8.8.8.8");

//Read all the properties
$city = $host->getCity();
$country = $host->getCountry();
$hostname = $host->getHostname();
$ip = $host->getIp();
$loc = $host->getLoc();
$org = $host->getOrg();
$phone = $host->getPhone();
$region = $host->getRegion();

Answer 2

I've done a bunch of testing with IP address services and here are a few ways I do it myself. First off a bunch off links to useful websites that I use:

https://db-ip.com/db Has a free ip-lookup service and has a few free csv files you can download. This uses a free api key that is attached to your email. It limits at 2000 queries per day.

http://ipinfo.io/ Free ip-lookup service without a api-key PHP functions:

//uses http://ipinfo.io/.
function ip_visitor_country($ip){
    $ip_data_in = get_web_page("http://ipinfo.io/".$ip."/json"); //add the ip to the url and retrieve the json data
    $ip_data = json_decode($ip_data_in['content'],true); //json_decode it for php use

    //this ip-lookup service returns 404 if the ip is invalid/not found so return false if this is the case.
    if(empty($ip_data) || $ip_data_in['httpcode'] == 404){
        return false;
    }else{
        return $ip_data; 
    }
}

function get_web_page($url){
    $user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0';

    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST  =>"GET",        //set request type post or get
        CURLOPT_POST           =>false,        //set to GET
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => $user_agent, //set user agent
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
        CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,    // don't return headers
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
        CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,      // timeout on connect
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,      // timeout on response
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
    );
    $ch = curl_init( $url );
    curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
    $content = curl_exec( $ch );
    $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
    $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
    $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
    $httpCode = curl_getinfo( $ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE );
    curl_close( $ch );  
    $header['errno']   = $err; //curl error code
    $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg; //curl error message
    $header['content'] = $content; //the webpage result (In this case the ip data in json array form)
    $header['httpcode'] = $httpCode; //the webpage response code
    return $header; //return the collected data and response codes
}

In the end you get something like this:

Array
(
    [ip] => 1.1.1.1
    [hostname] => No Hostname
    [city] => 
    [country] => AU
    [loc] => -27.0000,133.0000
    [org] => AS15169 Google Inc.
)

---

http://www.geoplugin.com/ Slightly older but this service gives you a bunch of extra usefull information such as the currency off the country, continent code, longitude and more.

---

http://lite.ip2location.com/database-ip-country-region-city-latitude-longitude Offers a bunch of downloadable files with instructions to import them into your database. Once you have one off these files in your database you can select the data fairly easily.

SELECT * FROM `ip2location_db5` WHERE IP > ip_from AND IP < ip_to

Use the php function ip2long(); to turn the ip-address into a numeric value. For example 1.1.1.1 becomes 16843009. This lets you scan for the ip ranges given to you by the database file.

So in order to find out where 1.1.1.1 belongs to all we do is run this query:

SELECT * FROM `ip2location_db5` WHERE 16843009 > ip_from AND 16843009 < ip_to;

This returns this data as a example.

FROM: 16843008
TO: 16843263
Country code: AU
Country: Australia
Region: Queensland
City: Brisbane
Latitude: -27.46794
Longitude: 153.02809

Answer 3

I wrote a bot using an API from ipapi.co, here's how you can get location for an IP address (e.g. 1.2.3.4) in php :

Set header :

$opts = array('http'=>array('method'=>"GET", 'header'=>"User-Agent: mybot.v0.7.1"));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);

Get JSON response

echo file_get_contents('https://ipapi.co/1.2.3.4/json/', false, $context);

of get a specific field (country, timezone etc.)

echo file_get_contents('https://ipapi.co/1.2.3.4/country/', false, $context);

Answer 4

If you're searching for an updated/accurate database I recommend to use this one here because it was showing my exact location which was not included in many other services when I was testing.
(My city was Rasht and my country was Iran with this ip address: 2.187.21.235 when I was testing.)

I recommend to use database rather than API methods, because it will be processed much faster locally.

Answer 5

Old post but still, i have tried almost all the services suggested here and the most accurate and fast i am using for production is: https://ip2location-api.com

They have Server and Client side solutions, JSON/XML/CSV/PHP formats, json ajax or javascript function callback, check out the documentation here

{"as":"AS15169 Google LLC","city":"Newark","country":"United States","countryCode":"US","isp":"Google Cloud","lat":40.7357,"lon":-74.1724,"org":"Google Cloud","query":"35.188.125.133","region":"NJ","regionName":"New Jersey","status":"success","timezone":"America/New_York","zip":"07175"}

Answer 6

You can also use "smart-ip" service:

$.getJSON("http://smart-ip.net/geoip-json?callback=?",
    function (data) {
        alert(data.countryName);
        alert(data.city);
    }
);