HTML 5 Geo Location Prompt in Chrome

Question

Just starting to get into HTML 5 and an testing out geo location...liking it so far. I am hitting a bit of a speed bump though...when I try to get my geo location, chrome automatically blocks the page from getting my location. This does not happen at other sites such as the site below:

http://html5demos.com/geo

The scripts I'm using:

<script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="geo.js"></script>    <script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="Utility.js"></script>  <script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="jquery.js"></script>  <script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="modernizr.js"></script>    function get_location() {          if (geo_position_js.init()) {             geo_position_js.getCurrentPosition(show_map, handle_error);         }      }     function show_map(position) {         var latitude = position.coords.latitude;         var longitude = position.coords.longitude;          alert("lat:" + latitude + " long:" + longitude);       }     function handle_error(err) {         alert(err.code);         if (err.code == 1) {             // user said no!         }     }      if (navigator.geolocation) {         navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(show_map, handle_error);     } else {         error('not supported');     } 

I am testing this out from a local directory on my machine, so there isn't really a "domain" like "http://whatever.com/mytestpage.html". Is this why I am not getting prompted? If so, is it possible to force the browswer to request permission to get the user's geo location and is it possible in my scenario?

Answer 1

There's some sort of security restriction in place in Chrome for using geolocation from a file:/// URI, though unfortunately it doesn't seem to record any errors to indicate that. It will work from a local web server. If you have python installed try opening a command prompt in the directory where your test files are and issuing the command:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 

It should start up a web server on port 8000 (might be something else, but it'll tell you in the console what port it's listening on), then browse to http://localhost:8000/mytestpage.html

If you don't have python there are equivalent modules in Ruby, or Visual Web Developer Express comes with a built in local web server.