Open Source Ip Geographical Location

Posted on April 2, 2007 by Guy Snir
Filed Under Open Source, .NET |

I was searching for a way to geographically locate my website visitors, this is usually used for better personalization of your website, regulatory compliance, things of that sort.

I found some very nice piece of Open Source code at MaxMind’s website.

They have very useful API’s (available for C, Perl, PHP, Apache Module, Java, Python, C#, Ruby, etc.) that do exactly what I was looking for.

There is also a DB available that is updated monthly to lookup the countries.

I needed a C# API so I downloaded the “C# API with Visual Studio project file for GeoIP Country only”, the sample code worked like a charm the first time, I tested it a bit (with my IP and IP’s from around the world) and it seems pretty accurate.

I am now in the process of incorporating the API into our software, some changes where necessary in the code (like removing Console.WriteLine outputs)

The use of the API is fairly simple.

I used some ASP.NET code to get the IP address:

HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]
HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"]

Then you use the API:

CountryLookup cl = new CountryLookup(@"GeoIP.dat");
cl.lookupCountryName("The IP addess")

That is about it.

Happy locationing!

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