This is the current web server of freegeoip.net, a public HTTP API for searching Geolocation of IP addresses.

It is the result of a research project that started in 2009 using Google App Engine's Python API. A year later it moved to its own server infrastructure, built on the cyclone web framework and backed by pypy.

It's been rewritten in Go using go-web, another experimental web anti-framework similar to web.py, tornado and cyclone. It's a tool to speed up the development and avoid repeating the same code over and over on web applications.

The database is composed of multiple files, from multiple sources. It's a combination of IP networks, country codes, city names, etc.

There's a helper script under the db directory that tries to download all files, process and combine them to build the database. It might eventually fail.

Make sure the db exists before starting the server. In the db directory, execute updatedb - it's a Python script. Should look like this:

$ ./updatedb
Downloading http://dev.maxmind.com/static/csv/codes/maxmind/region.csv
Downloading http://musta.sh/files/all_cities_in_the_world.csv.zip
Extracting all_cities_in_the_world.csv -> all_cities_in_the_world.csv
Checking http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity_CSV/GeoLiteCity-latest.zip
Downloading http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity_CSV/GeoLiteCity-latest.zip
Extracting GeoLiteCity_20130305/GeoLiteCity-Blocks.csv -> GeoLiteCity-Blocks.csv
Extracting GeoLiteCity_20130305/GeoLiteCity-Location.csv -> GeoLiteCity-Location.csv
Downloading http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoIPCountryCSV.zip
Extracting GeoIPCountryWhois.csv -> GeoIPCountryWhois.csv
Importing GeoIPCountryWhois.csv: .178306 records!
Importing region.csv: 4053 records!
Importing GeoLiteCity-Blocks.csv: ......................2256115 records!
Importing GeoLiteCity-Location.csv: ....403753 records!
Updating region names: 322 names updated.

This service includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from maxmind.com.

Run the dev server with go run freegeoip.go and point your browser to it. Use curl to query the API, like this:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/xml/ip_or_hostname

It supports CSV, JSON and XML. If ip_or_hostname is omitted, the IP of the client making the request is used.

If the server is listening on unix sockets, use nc to test:

echo -ne 'GET /json/ HTTP/1.0\r\nX-Real-IP: pwnz\r\n\r\n' | nc -U /tmp/freegeoip

To query the API from the command line, add this to ~/.bash_profile:

function geoip_curl_xml { curl -D - http://freegeoip.net/xml/$1; }
alias geoip=geoip_curl_xml

Thanks to (in no particular order):

• google.com: Because it wouldn't look so good without the map
• twitter.com: Bootstrap makes dirty programmers feel like artists
• ipinfodb.com: For providing both GeoIP and Timezones database (2010 and 2011)
• maxmind.com: For the current DB