Getting a user country name from originating IP address with Ruby on Rails

Question

I want to extract a user country name from visitors' IP addresses.

I could get the IP address with remote_ip. But what could be the easiest way to get the country name?

It doesn't have to be super accurate. Any ruby library (gem or plugin) to do this?

I want an simple and easy solution for this.

Answer 1

You can use geoip gem.

environment.rb

config.gem 'geoip' 

Download GeoIP.dat.gz from http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry. unzip the file. The below assumes under #{RAILS_ROOT}/db dir.

@geoip ||= GeoIP.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/db/GeoIP.dat")     remote_ip = request.remote_ip  if remote_ip != "127.0.0.1" #todo: check for other local addresses or set default value   location_location = @geoip.country(remote_ip)   if location_location != nil          @model.country = location_location[2]   end end