geoip-country

Less memory usage version of geoip-lite by limiting to country information. This product includes GeoLite2 ipv4 and ipv6 country data which created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com. The database of this product updates weekly.

You should read this README and the LICENSE and EULA files carefully before deciding to use this product.
After v4, LICENSE for the database was changed. If you need to use this product with previous LICENSE, please use v3.

Synopsis

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

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

console.log(geo);
{ range: [ 3479299040, 3479299071 ],
  country: 'US'}

Installation

1. Install the library

$ npm install geoip-country

2. Update MaxMind's geoip data

$ npm run-script updatedb --license_key=YOUR_GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY
	or
$ GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY=YOUR_GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY node scripts/updatedb.js

YOUR_GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY should be replaced by a valid GeoLite2 license key. Please follow instructions provided by MaxMind to obtain a license key.

API

geoip-country 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 20ms 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:

{
   range: [ <low bound of IP block>, <high bound of IP block> ],
   country: 'XX' // 2 letter ISO-3166-1 country code
}

The actual values for the range array depend on whether the IP is IPv4 or IPv6 and should be considered internal to geoip-country. To get a human readable format, pass them to geoip.pretty()

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

Update database API [Added at v4.1.0]

You can update country database with updateDatabase method.

    geoip.updateDatabase(license_key, callback);

license_key is a license key which provided by MaxMind. You can get GeoLite2 license key as instructions.

Pretty printing an IP address

If you have a 32 bit unsigned integer, or a number returned as part of the range array from the lookup method, the pretty method can be used to turn it into a human readable string.

    console.log("The IP is %s", geoip.pretty(ip));

This method returns a string if the input was in a format that geoip-country can recognize, else it returns the input itself.

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 --license_key=YOUR_GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY
	or
GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY=YOUR_GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY node scripts/updatedb.js

YOUR_GEOLITE2_LICENSE_KEY should be replaced by a valid GeoLite2 license key. Please follow instructions provided by MaxMind to obtain a license key.

Custom Directory for database files

You can store the database files in custom directory with the environment variable GEODATADIR or CLI parameter --geodatadir=XXXXX. For creating or updating the database files in custom directory, you need to run built-in updater as documented above with setting the environment variable GEODATADIR or CLI parameter --geodatadir=XXXXX. If you have no write-access to the geoip-country directory, it would be better to set the environment GEOTMPDATADIR or CLI parameter --geotmpdatadir=YYYYY for temporary directory when updating the database files.

License and EULA

Please carefully read the LICENSE and EULA files. This package comes with certain restrictions and obligations, most notably:

• You cannot prevent the library from updating the databases.
• You cannot use the GeoLite2 data:
  • for FCRA purposes,
  • to identify specific households or individuals.

You can read the latest version of GeoLite2 EULA.

References

• GeoLite2 EULA
• Documentation from MaxMind
• ISO 3166 (1 & 2) codes
• FIPS region codes