SubscribeSuper fast IP to lat/lng in Rails
In building the eye candy demo for the Graphing Social conference, I needed a quick way to geo-locate users by IP address. For Rails, GeoKit is an awesome plugin. It supports a list of providers, and overlays distance calculations, before_filter helpers, all sorts of good stuff.
It uses hostip.info to do IP to lat/lng, using their RESTful interface:
http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=12.215.42.19&position=true Country: UNITED STATES (US) City: Sugar Grove, IL Latitude: 41.7696 Longitude: -88.4588
This is great, but its just too darn slow to geolocate 12 users a second. All I needed was a FAST ip to lat/long lookup mechanism. Luckily, HostInfo provides the raw data. Here’s how I built super fast GeoLoc by IP method.
Download, create a DB, and import the data.
wget http://hostip.ww.com/hostip_current.sql.gz
gunzip hostip_current.sql.gz
mysqladmin -uroot create hostip
mysql -uroot hostip < hostip_current.sql
Create a simple HostIp class. Note: I need to dynamically build this query b/c the data is sharded across tables by the A class of the IP.
class Hostip < ActiveRecord::Base def self.geocode(ip) a,b,c,d = ip.split(".") self.set_table_name "hostip.ip4_#{a}" ip = find(:first, :select => "lat,lng", :joins => %Q{INNER JOIN hostip.cityByCountry ON hostip.ip4_#{a}.city = hostip.cityByCountry.city AND hostip.ip4_#{a}.country = hostip.cityByCountry.country}, :conditions => ["b = ? and c = ?", b,c]) if ip [ip.lat, ip.lng] else ["",""] end end end
Usage
>> Hostip.geocode("4.2.2.2") => ["39.944", "-105.062"]
Thats it! Now you can geolocate by IP in your own datacenter.
Thanks again to the guys at HostIp for sharing this data!
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Nice find.
we use something very similar but it’s called GeoIP.
gem install geoip
very quick to setup, and uses the monthly updated (first of every month) MaxMind GeoIP binary indexes (very fast). We use a cronjob to curl and untar every month across our multiple application servers (so each copy is independent per machine, saves the query on the database.)
http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoIP.dat.gz
Pluging it in was easy:
def ip_country(ip)
g = GeoIP.new(’/var/lib/geodata/GeoIP.dat’).country(ip)
return g[3]
end
That free database is killer. I’ve twice seen projects where not only did they pay for the long/lat-to-city/state data, but they queried it via a web service. Not "super fast" at all. Thanks for documenting.
In sufficient database. I can not find lat long of some region like BANGLADESH.