Get a localized name of the users city via Maxmind GeoLite2 Free

Question

i want to show the german name of the users city. Is it possible with the free Version of Maxmind Geoip? I did not find a way to open the GeoLite2-City.mmdb or GeoLiteCity.dat, to see which cities are listed, for building my own translation service. How can i open them?

Answer 1

Here's how to do it without Composer.

• Download the zip DB-Reader here: https://github.com/maxmind/MaxMind-DB-Reader-php
• Download the data file here (city or country or both): http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/
• Uncompress the data files and put them in a new directory, foo.
• In DB-Reader, copy examples/benchmark.php to foo/benchmark.php.
• In DB-Reader, copy src/MaxMind/Db to foo/Db.
• Edit foo/benchmark.php.

Change:

require_once '../vendor/autoload.php';
use MaxMind\Db\Reader;
$reader = new Reader('GeoIP2-City.mmdb');

To:

require_once __DIR__ . '/' . 'Db/Reader.php';
require_once __DIR__ . '/' . 'Db/Reader/Decoder.php';
require_once __DIR__ . '/' . 'Db/Reader/InvalidDatabaseException.php';
require_once __DIR__ . '/' . 'Db/Reader/Metadata.php';
require_once __DIR__ . '/' . 'Db/Reader/Util.php';     // new 2014/09
use MaxMind\Db\Reader;
$mmdb= true ? 'GeoLite2-City.mmdb' : 'GeoLite2-Country.mmdb';
$reader = new Reader( __DIR__  . '/' . $mmdb );

You'll need PHP 5.3+. You even get some savings in code and number of files vs. using Composer. (Some testing code is eliminated, as well as the whole Guzzle structure.) Also, it makes it clearer how namespaces work in PHP as a nice replacement for classes (when classes are used just for name-spacing).

The rest of benchmark.php you can discard and start using $reader->get().

If you do want to benchmark, on most platforms you need to modify the rand() call. Try this:

Change:

$ip = long2ip(rand(0, pow(2, 32) -1));

To:

$n= (float)mt_rand(0, pow(2, 31) - 1);
if (mt_rand(0,1)) $n+= pow(2, 31);
$ip = long2ip($n);

Or just join four mt_rand(0,255)'s with '.', which is probably easier!

........................ Edit 2014/09 ........................

Added 'Db/Reader/Util.php' above.

Version of MaxMind-DB-Reader-php: 1.0.0 (2014-09-22)

Your file structure should look like this:

./benchmark.php
./GeoLite2-City.mmdb
./GeoLite2-Country.mmdb
./Db/Reader.php
./Db/Reader/Decoder.php
./Db/Reader/InvalidDatabaseException.php
./Db/Reader/Metadata.php
./Db/Reader/Util.php

Answer 2

The GeoIP Legacy database does not include localized names, but the GeoIP2 (or GeoLite2) database does. You may access the localized name as follows:

<?php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
use GeoIp2\Database\Reader;

$reader = new Reader('/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLite2-City.mmdb');

$record = $reader->city('128.101.101.101');

print($record->country->names['de'] . "\n");

Alternatively, if you would like the reader to default to German and fall back to English when it isn't available, you can set the language in the constructor:

<?php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
use GeoIp2\Database\Reader;

$reader = new Reader('/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLite2-City.mmdb', array('de', 'en'));

$record = $reader->city('128.101.101.101');

print($record->country->name . "\n");

Answer 3

I would recommend using the PHP Extension API if you are concerned at all about performance. You can get upwards of 7 million queries per second with the PHP (C API) extension.

I describe how to compile the extension, and how to use the mmdb databases in PHP to get the localized city name here:

Intro to Maxmind GeoLite2 with Kohana PHP