ServiceIPGeolocation Module

[netcarver]

A module that uses the db-ip.com IP Geolocation service to fetch geolocation information when given an IP address. I wrote this quickly to help anyone who might be stuck with the #VATMOSS mess and need a way to geo-locate a customer's IP address.

You will need to register with db-ip.com in order to get an api key but they have a pretty generous daily-query allowance even for the free key (2000 lookups a day.)

Here it is on github.

And in the module repository.

[teppo]

Looks like this could come in handy. Just recently wrote a snippet to do the same via ipinfo.io, but db-ip.com seems to be at least cheaper. Do they provide HTTPS support, or is it just plain HTTP? Didn't see that in the docs

Also, is there particular reason not to use WireHttp? Mostly out of interest; probably won't matter much in real use.

[Joss]

I had also noticed this:

https://www.maxmind.com/en/opensource

[netcarver]

@Teppo

I tried using db-ip.com with HTTPS and it didn't work. I wonder if they reserve that for one of the paid plans. Also, they had an example client class so I took some inspiration from that when calling through to their service and that's why WireHttp wasn't used. Doesn't mean that couldn't happen in a later version.

@Joss

Thanks for the link. I had a very quick peek but didn't see the answer to this: do they offer a live restful service or is it a lookup in a self-hosted DB?

[Joss]

ummmm

Didn't really look - I saw it because it is being used for a woocommerce plugin for the vat moss thingy

[Joss]

Okay, this is what is using it - https://wordpress.org/plugins/geoip-detect/

It basically does an automatic update weekly

[netcarver]

Minor updates pushed.

@Joss

Thank you for update and the link! I wanted to go for a solution that didn't involve hosting the data myself (either in DB tables or flat files) - but it does leave the site at the mercy of the service's availability. I may investigate a locally-hosted auto-updating version at some point though.

[teppo]

Thank you for update and the link! I wanted to go for a solution that didn't involve hosting the data myself (either in DB tables or flat files) - but it does leave the site at the mercy of the service's availability. I may investigate a locally-hosted auto-updating version at some point though.

The gelocation snippet I built earlier was purely on the frontend (JS). Didn't want to host (and keep up to date) the IP database locally, and wanted to avoid extra load and delays server-side. Drawback, of course, is that it might not work (sometimes the user just won't get redirected) and the redirect always happens after the page has been loaded (whether the delay is noticeable or not).

Whatever way you go, there are still issues to deal with