GeoIP Legacy Java API

End of Life

MaxMind will be retiring the GeoIP Legacy databases at the end of May 2022. Until then, this library will only receive critical security and bug fixes. Support for this library will end completely with the last release of the legacy GeoIP databases.

We recommend that you upgrade to our GeoIP2 databases. You can read these from Java using our GeoIP2 Java API.

See our blog post for more information.

Define Your Dependencies

We recommend installing this package with Maven. To do this, add the dependency to your pom.xml:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.maxmind.geoip</groupId>
        <artifactId>geoip-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.3.1</version>
    </dependency>

Building Manually

Installation

mvn clean install

Packaging

mvn package

The jar file will be in the target directory.

Testing

mvn test

IP Geolocation Usage

IP geolocation is inherently imprecise. Locations are often near the center of the population. Any location provided by a GeoIP database or web service should not be used to identify a particular address or household.

Memory Caching and Other Options

The following options can be passed as the second parameter to the LookupService constructor.

• GEOIP_STANDARD - Read database from file system. Uses the least memory.
• GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE - Load database into memory. This provides faster performance but uses more memory
• GEOIP_CHECK_CACHE - Check for updated database. If database has been updated, reload file handle and/or memory cache.
• GEOIP_INDEX_CACHE - Cache only the most frequently accessed index portion of the database, resulting in faster lookups than GEOIP_STANDARD, but less memory usage than GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE. This is useful for larger databases such as GeoIP Legacy Organization and GeoIP Legacy City. Note: for GeoIP Legacy Country, Region and Netspeed databases, GEOIP_INDEX_CACHE is equivalent to GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE.

These options may be combined. For example:

LookupService cl = new LookupService(dbfile,
    LookupService.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE | LookupService.GEOIP_CHECK_CACHE);

Thread Safety

As of version 1.1.4 this API is thread safe.