Use MaxMind to target visitors based on IP address_PHP Tutorial

Sometimes you need to know which country your site visitors are coming from - for example if you are planning to run a geographically targeted advertising program. This article will introduce this method.

Sometimes you need to know which country your site visitors are coming from - for example if you are planning to run a geographically targeted advertising program. This is where tools like MaxMind's GeoIP come in - it allows you to easily obtain a visitor's exact geographic location from their IP address.

MaxMind provides commercial databases and free databases. The former is more accurate and can reach the level of city information where the user is located, while the latter can only determine the country and region. In this article, we will demonstrate how to use the free version. If you need more detailed information, such as the city and country information of remote customers, you need to purchase a more detailed database from MaxMind: http://www.maxmind.com.

Getting Started

To use this software, you must first download the GeoIP free country information file: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country and store it in a certain location on the web server directory. Then you need to select the language API used by the database file. To simplify the entire process, we will use a pure PHP version to avoid any additional configuration or setup of Apache components. Please remember to read the software license terms before installing the software to the website: http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/LICENSE.txt to make sure you agree to these terms.

Code List A

// include functions

include("geoip.inc");

// read GeoIP database

$handle = geoip_open("GeoIP.dat", GEOIP_STANDARD);

// map IP to country

echo "IP address 62.149.130.132 located in " . geoip_country_name_by_addr($handle, "62.149.130.132") . " (country code " . geoip_country_code_by_addr($handle, "62.149.130.132") . ")";

// close database handler
// www.knowsky.com

geoip_close($handle);

// print compulsory license notice

echo "

-- This product includes GeoIP data created by MaxMind, available from http://maxmind.com/ --";

?>

The code in Listing A shows the use of the module (geoip.inc) to Basic method of accessing the GeoIP free country information database (GeoIP.dat). The example assumes that the PHP include and country information database files are both in the same directory as the PHP file itself. If the examples differ from your installation, you will need to change the paths as needed.

The sample code is quite clear. After introducing the GeoIP PHP function library, the first step is to use the geoip_open() function to open the GeoIP database file. This function receives two parameters: database file path and database type.

We then use the handle returned by calling geoip_open() to obtain the two-letter country code and intuitive country name based on the given IP address. Among them, we also need to use the functions geoip_country_code_by_addr() and geoip_country_code_by_name() respectively. Both accept two parameters: the handle returned by geoip_open() and the IP address to be resolved.

Once we have the required information, we close the database file by calling geoip_close().

does is that simple.