Django geoip2 + Maxmind working locally, but not in production?

Question

I'm able to get a response object and render it to the page locally, but on my live site it doesn't work.

I'm using Maxmind's binary database, which is the GeoLite2-City.mmdb file in my project folder.

This also works in my website's Ubuntu 16.04 terminal:

import geoip2.database
reader = geoip2.database.Reader('/home/jake/project-main/project/GeoLite2-City.mmdb')
ip = request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR', None)
location_lookup_response = reader.city(ip)
print(location_lookup_resonse)

However, it doesn't work on the site. Any thoughts here are appreciated.

Answer 1

In your settings.py file, you should have the GEOIP_PATH set to the directory which contains the GeoLite2-*.mmdb files. The documentation for that can be found here.

Once the *.mmdb files are in the GEOIP_PATH, you should be able to find them using the django shell:

$ python manage.py shell

>>> from django.conf import settings
>>> print(settings.GEOIP_PATH)
'/path/to/geoip-mmdb-files'

>>> import os
>>> os.listdir(settings.GEOIP_PATH)
['GeoLite2-City.mmdb', 'GeoLite2-Country.mmdb']

>>> from django.contrib.gis.geoip2 import GeoIP2
>>> g = GeoIP2()
>>> g.country('google.com')
{'country_code': 'US', 'country_name': 'United States'}