GeoIP-lite

A native NodeJS API for the GeoLite data from MaxMind.

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://maxmind.com/

introduction

MaxMind provides a set of data files for IP to Geo mapping along with opensource libraries to parse and lookup these data files. One would typically write a wrapper around their C API to get access to this data in other languages (like JavaScript).

GeoIP-lite instead attempts to be a fully native JavaScript library. A converter script converts the CSV files from MaxMind into an internal binary format (note that this is different from the binary data format provided by MaxMind). The geoip module uses this binary file to lookup IP addresses and return the country, region and city that it maps to.

philosophy

I was really aiming for a fast JavaScript native implementation for geomapping of IPs. My prime motivator was the fact that it was really hard to get libgeoip built for Mac OSX without using the library from MacPorts.

why geoip-lite

So why are we called geoip-lite? npm already has a geoip package which provides a JavaScript binding around libgeoip from MaxMind. The geoip package is fully featured and supports everything that the MaxMind APIs support, however, it requires libgeoip to be installed on your system.

geoip-lite on the other hand is a fully JavaScript implementation. It is not as fully featured as geoip however, by reducing its scope, it is about 40% faster at doing lookups. On average, an IP to Location lookup should take 20 microseconds on a Macbook Pro. IPv4 addresses take about 6 microseconds, while IPv6 addresses take about 30 microseconds.

synopsis

var geoip = require('geoip-lite');

var ip = "207.97.227.239";
var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);

console.log(geo);
{ range: [ 3479298048, 3479300095 ],
  country: 'US',
  region: 'TX',
  eu: '0',
  timezone: 'America/Chicago',
  city: 'San Antonio',
  ll: [ 29.4969, -98.4032 ],
  metro: 641,
  area: 1000,
  postalCode:  '04300'

installation

1. get the library

$ npm install geoip-lite

2. update the datafiles (optional)

Run cd node_modules/geoip-lite && npm run-script updatedb license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY to update the data files. (Replace YOUR_LICENSE_KEY with your license key obtained from maxmind.com)

You can create maxmind account here

NOTE that this requires a lot of RAM. It is known to fail on on a Digital Ocean or AWS micro instance. There are no plans to change this. geoip-lite stores all data in RAM in order to be fast.

API

geoip-lite is completely synchronous. There are no callbacks involved. All blocking file IO is done at startup time, so all runtime calls are executed in-memory and are fast. Startup may take up to 200ms while it reads into memory and indexes data files.

Looking up an IP address

If you have an IP address in dotted quad notation, IPv6 colon notation, or a 32 bit unsigned integer (treated as an IPv4 address), pass it to the lookup method. Note that you should remove any [ and ] around an IPv6 address before passing it to this method.

var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);

If the IP address was found, the lookup method returns an object with the following structure:

{
   range: [ <low bound of IP block>, <high bound of IP block> ],
   country: 'XX',                 // 2 letter ISO-3166-1 country code
   region: 'RR',                  // Up to 3 alphanumeric variable length characters as ISO 3166-2 code
                                  // For US states this is the 2 letter state
                                  // For the United Kingdom this could be ENG as a country like “England
                                  // FIPS 10-4 subcountry code
   eu: '0',                       // 1 if the country is a member state of the European Union, 0 otherwise.
   timezone: 'Country/Zone',      // Timezone from IANA Time Zone Database
   city: "City Name",             // This is the full city name
   ll: [<latitude>, <longitude>], // The latitude and longitude of the city
   metro: <metro code>,           // Metro code
   area: <accuracy_radius>        // The approximate accuracy radius (km), around the latitude and longitude
}

The actual values for the range array depend on whether the IP is IPv4 or IPv6 and should be considered internal to geoip-lite. To get a human readable format, pass them to geoip.pretty()

If the IP address was not found, the lookup returns null

Pretty printing an IP address

If you have a 32 bit unsigned integer, or a number returned as part of the range array from the lookup method, the pretty method can be used to turn it into a human readable string.

    console.log("The IP is %s", geoip.pretty(ip));

This method returns a string if the input was in a format that geoip-lite can recognise, else it returns the input itself.

Built-in Updater

This package contains an update script that can pull the files from MaxMind and handle the conversion from CSV. A npm script alias has been setup to make this process easy. Please keep in mind this requires internet and MaxMind rate limits that amount of downloads on their servers.

You will need, at minimum, a free license key obtained from maxmind.com to run the update script.

Package stores checksums of MaxMind data and by default only downloads them if checksums have changed.

Ways to update data

#update data if new data is available
npm run-script updatedb license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

#force udpate data even if checkums have not changed
npm run-script updatedb-force license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

You can also run it by doing:

node ./node_modules/geoip-lite/scripts/updatedb.js license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

Ways to reload data in your app when update finished

If you have a server running geoip-lite, and you want to reload its geo data, after you finished update, without a restart.

Programmatically

You can do it programmatically, calling after scheduled data updates

//Synchronously
geoip.reloadDataSync();

//Asynchronously
geoip.reloadData(function(){
    console.log("Done");
});

Automatic Start and stop watching for data updates

You can enable the data watcher to automatically refresh in-memory geo data when a file changes in the data directory.

geoip.startWatchingDataUpdate();

This tool can be used with npm run-script updatedb to periodically update geo data on a running server.

Caveats

This package includes the GeoLite database from MaxMind. This database is not the most accurate database available, however it is the best available for free. You can use the commercial GeoIP database from MaxMind with better accuracy by buying a license from MaxMind, and then using the conversion utility to convert it to a format that geoip-lite understands. You will need to use the .csv files from MaxMind for conversion.

Also note that on occassion, the library may take up to 5 seconds to load into memory. This is largely dependent on how busy your disk is at that time. It can take as little as 200ms on a lightly loaded disk. This is a one time cost though, and you make it up at run time with very fast lookups.

Memory usage

Quick test on memory consumption shows that library uses around 100Mb per process

    var geoip = require('geoip-lite');
    console.log(process.memoryUsage());
    /**
    * Outputs:
    * {
    *     rss: 126365696,
    *     heapTotal: 10305536,
    *     heapUsed: 5168944,
    *     external: 104347120
    * }
    **/

Alternatives

If your use-case requires doing less than 100 queries through the lifetime of your application or if you need really fast latency on start-up, you might want to look into fast-geoip a package with a compatible API that is optimized for serverless environments and provides faster boot times and lower memory consumption at the expense of longer lookup times.

References

• Documentation from MaxMind
• ISO 3166 (1 & 2) codes
• FIPS region codes

Copyright

geoip-lite is Copyright 2011-2018 Philip Tellis [email protected] and the latest version of the code is available at https://github.com/bluesmoon/node-geoip

License

There are two licenses for the code and data. See the LICENSE file for details.