Identifying a country or city from an IP address in NGINX

Photo by S Migaj on Unsplash

Introduction

In this post, I will cover the topic of Identifying a Country or City by IP Address on an NGINX Server. GeoLite2 this a DB has been created by MaxMind to identify countries and cities by IP address. There is a commercial version of GeoIP2 and an open source version of GeoLite2 , however, to be able to download this database, we must create an account at https://www.maxmind.com/

Environment

• Ubuntu 18.04
• NGINX (latest stable version)
• GeoIP2 module
• Free maxmind account (you will need to download databases)

Let’s start

• Install libmaxminddb

root@vagrant:/home/vagrant# add-apt-repository ppa:maxmind/ppa
More info: https://launchpad.net/~maxmind/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it
gpg: keyring `/tmp/tmpsm2acf17/secring.gpg' created
gpg: keyring `/tmp/tmpsm2acf17/pubring.gpg' created
gpg: requesting key DE742AFA from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: /tmp/tmpsm2acf17/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key DE742AFA: public key "Launchpad PPA for MaxMind" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1…