freegeoip.net

freegeoip.net is a public web service for searching geolocation of IP addresses. This is freegeoip.net's web server source code, and scripts for generating the database.

Overview

freegeoip.net is the result of a web server research project that started in 2009 hosted at Google's App Engine, using the Python API. A year later it moved to its own server infrastructure built on the Cyclone web framework, backed by Twisted and PyPy.

The current version is written in Go as the experiments progress with go-web and go-redis.

Prerequisites

List of prerequisites for building and running the server:

• Go compiler - for freegeoip.go
• libsqlite3-dev, gcc or llvm - for dependency go-sqlite3
• Python - for the updatedb script
• Redis - for API usage quotas
• The IP database

Building the database

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 automates the process of building the database, and can be used regularly to update it as well. Because it downloads multiple files and process them, it might eventually fail.

It's a Python script called updatedb that generates ipdb.sqlite:

$ cd db
$ ./updatedb
... will download files and process them to generate ipdb.sqlite
$ file ipdb.sqlite
ipdb.sqlite: SQLite 3.x database

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

Build and run

Make sure the Go compiler is installed and $GOPATH is set. Install dependencies first:

go get github.com/fiorix/go-redis/redis
go get github.com/fiorix/go-web/httpxtra
go get github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3

Use either go run freegeoip.go or go build; ./freegeoip to compile and run the server, then point the browser to http://localhost:8080.

The server requires freegeoip.conf to be in the current directory. If the database is not accessible or redis-server is unreachable, all queries will result in HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable).

We recommend supervisor for running the server in production. On Ubuntu, install it with apt-get install supervisor and drop this simple config in /etc/supervisor/conf.d/freegeoip.conf:

[program:freegeoip]
user=www-data
redirect_stderr=true
directory=/opt/freegeoip
command=/opt/freegeoip/freegeoip
stdout_logfile=/var/log/freegeoip.log
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=50MB
stdout_logfile_backups=20

If the server is proxied by Nginx or another HTTP load balancer, edit the configuration file and set xheaders="true" and it'll use X-Real-IP or X-Forwarded-For HTTP headers as the client IP.

For listening on low ports as non-root user (e.g. www-data) on linux, it's mandatory to set file capabilities like this:

/sbin/setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /opt/freegeoip/freegeoip

Usage

Point the browser to http://localhost:8080 and search for IPs or hostnames.

Use curl from the command line to query the API:

$ curl -v http://localhost:8080/{format}/{ip_or_hostname}

It supports csv, json and xml as the output format. JSON supports callbacks with the callback query argument. The client (self) IP is used if ip_or_hostname is omitted in the query.

Examples:

$ curl -v http://localhost:8080/csv/
$ curl -v http://localhost:8080/xml/
$ curl -v http://localhost:8080/xml/freegeoip.net
$ curl -v http://localhost:8080/json/github.com?callback=foobar

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

echo -ne 'GET /json/my-domain.abc HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc -U /tmp/freegeoip.sock

Credits

Thanks to (in no particular order):

• Gleicon for all the drama.
• Google for the map, Go, and AngularJS.
• Twitter for Bootstrap.
• MaxMind for the current database.
• ipinfodb.com for both the IP and timezones database back in 2010 and 2011.