How to retrieve city and country through IP address in PHP

Question

I am trying to make a log of users heading to my website. I want to save their IP addresses, as well as city and country info.

Thanks in Advance.

I came to know that there are some PHP libraries that does some of above work. Do you know anyone of them ? — yusufiqbalpk, Apr 26 '12 at 12:49

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 26 '12 at 12:43

2

Try using MaxMind GeoIP database which I find the best solution that's freely available. It has a set of methods to retrieve the city and the country by IP and to get the ip just use: $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

answered Apr 26 '12 at 12:43

Ignas

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you beat me to suggesting MaxMind :) – djdy Apr 26 '12 at 12:56

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 26 '12 at 12:41

1

You can get the IP from $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']. To get location you will have to find some service that provides lookup and check the IP you just collected.

You might also consider signing up for Google analytics.

answered Apr 26 '12 at 12:41

danneth

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I'm not suggesting you do this manually. You take the IP collected and send it inside your PHP script to some webservice/api/library and then store that response together with the IP. But personally, I would only use Google Analytics, but that depends on your needs of course – danneth Apr 26 '12 at 12:57
Sorry for that. I think that using google analytics is a better idea then holding a long and long database for ip or relying on other apis and libs that can take while in an operation. Thanks for your comment. You answered first and right. Thanks – yusufiqbalpk Apr 26 '12 at 13:00
@yusufiqbalpk: No worries, I could have been clearer there. As for the downvote, I don't know... – danneth Apr 26 '12 at 14:29

Sumant · Answer 3 · 2012-04-26T12:53:10.203

I Think you should go for Google analytic, All these data you will get from there. Otherwise for ip address you can use this script

function getIP() {
$ip;
if (getenv("HTTP_CLIENT_IP"))
$ip = getenv("HTTP_CLIENT_IP");
else if(getenv("HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"))
$ip = getenv("HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR");
else if(getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"))
$ip = getenv("REMOTE_ADDR");
else
$ip = "UNKNOWN";
return $ip;
}

& for country name

http://geoip.wtanaka.com/cc/$ipaddr

this will return country ISO code.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 26 '12 at 12:43

Do the users input their City and Country? If yes then easily save the data to database.

Or do you want to track these by IP? If this one - download/buy the database of the countries by ip from http://www.ip2country.net/download.html and only put the IP into the database.

How to retrieve city and country through IP address in PHP

4 Answers4