MaxMind will be retiring the GeoIP Legacy databases at the end of May 2022. Until then, this library will only receive critical security and bug fixes. Support for this library will end completely with the last release of the legacy GeoIP databases.

We recommend that you upgrade to our GeoIP2 databases. You can read these from C using libmaxminddb.

See our blog post for more information.

The GeoIP Legacy C library enables the user to find geographical and network information of an IP address. To use this library, you may user our commercial GeoIP Legacy databases. For more details, see:

https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-services-and-databases

IP geolocation is inherently imprecise. Locations are often near the center of the population. Any location provided by a GeoIP database should not be used to identify a particular address or household.

MaxMind provides a PPA for recent version of Ubuntu. To add the PPA to your APT sources, run:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maxmind/ppa

Then install the packages by running:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install libgeoip1 libgeoip-dev geoip-bin

To install, run:

./configure
make
make check
make install

If you are using a GitHub checkout, please run the bootstrap script first to set up the build environment.

The GeoIP Legacy C library relies on GNU make, not on BSD make

To make a static GeoIP.lib, edit the top level Makefile.vc to reflect where the GeoIP.dat database file should be placed, as well as the locations of the lib, include, and bin directories for installation.

To build and install, issue the following commands from a developer console:

nmake /f Makefile.vc
nmake /f Makefile.vc test
nmake /f Makefile.vc install

./configure
make
cp data/GeoIP.dat test/
make check

Note that GeoIP.dat file should be placed in the same place as GeoIP-enabled executable modules.

There are five options available:

• GEOIP_STANDARD - Read database from file system. This uses the least memory.
• GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE - Load database into memory. Provides faster performance but uses more memory.
• GEOIP_CHECK_CACHE - Check for updated database. If database has been updated, reload file handle and/or memory cache.
• GEOIP_INDEX_CACHE - Cache only the the most frequently accessed index portion of the database, resulting in faster lookups than GEOIP_STANDARD, but less memory usage than GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE. This is useful for larger databases such as GeoIP Legacy Organization and GeoIP Legacy City. Note: for GeoIP Legacy Country, Region and Netspeed databases, GEOIP_INDEX_CACHE is equivalent to GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE.
• GEOIP_MMAP_CACHE - Load database into mmap shared memory. MMAP is not available for 32bit Windows.
• GEOIP_SILENCE - Disables diagnostic messages to stderr in the library; error conditions are detectable via the return values.

These options can be combined using bit operators. For example you can use both GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE and GEOIP_CHECK_CACHE by calling:

GeoIP_open("/path/to/GeoIP.dat", GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE | GEOIP_CHECK_CACHE);

By default, the city name is returned in the ISO-8859-1 charset. To obtain the city name in UTF-8 instead, run:

GeoIP_set_charset(gi, GEOIP_CHARSET_UTF8);

To get the netmask of the netblock of the last lookup, use GeoIP_last_netmask(gi).

See the following files for examples of how to use the API:

test/
     test-geoip.c
     test-geoip-region.c
     test-geoip-city.c
     test-geoip-isp.c
     test-geoip-org.c
     test-geoip-netspeed.c

These example programs use our GeoIP Legacy databases.

In case of trouble building from source with libtool or autotools, update the generated configuration files by running:

./bootstrap

or

autoreconf -vfi

or

aclocal && autoconf && automake --add-missing

Lookups are thread safe, but libGeoIP does not guard the functions. Do not drop or change the GeoIP database if other threads might be using the database.

The recommended pattern is:

1. open database with GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE
2. create_threads(your_thread_entry_function)
3. use the database
4. join_threads
5. close database

The Windows build is not thread-safe in STANDARD mode because the pread is not thread-safe.

If you run into trouble building your application with GeoIP Legacy support, try adding -fms-extensions to your CFLAGS. If you use Solaris and the default C compiler, use -features=extensions instead. These options enable unnamed union support to fix problems like: improper member use: dma_code or 'GeoIPRecord' has no member named 'dma_code'.

Note that it is recommended that you use GNU make. Also, if you are using OpenBSD, this library requires OpenBSD 3.1 or greater.

If you get a "cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory" error, add the directory libGeoIP.so was installed to the /etc/ld.so.conf file and run ldconfig.

On Solaris, if you get a ld: fatal: relocations remain against allocatable but non-writable sections, try running:

make clean
./configure --disable-shared
make

If you get a ar : command not found error, make sure that ar is in your path. On Solaris, ar is typically found in /usr/ccs/bin

If you get a passing argument 3 of 'gethostbyname_r' from incompatible pointer type error on AIX, untar a fresh copy of this library and delete the following two lines from ./configure:

#define HAVE_GETHOSTBYNAME_R 1

#define GETHOSTBYNAME_R_RETURNS_INT 1

then save the configure script and build it as usual:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Please report all issues with this code using the GitHub issue tracker.

If you are having an issue with a MaxMind database that is not specific to this API, please contact MaxMind support.

To contribute, please submit a pull request on GitHub.