GeoIP2 and GeoLite2 Web Services Documentation

Overview

To learn more about the GeoIP2 web services and to purchase credits, please view our GeoIP2 web services page.

If you are interested in minFraud Insights or minFraud Factors web services, which also contain GeoIP2 Insights data, please contact our Enterprise Business team for assistance. To better understand the differences between each minFraud service, review our minFraud Service Plans and Pricing page and the Response Body section below.

Client APIs

Official Client APIs

Third-Party Client APIs

Timeout Errors

If you get timeout errors, first confirm if we experienced a service disruption on our status page or on Pingdom.

If there has not been a service disruption, we may be able to help you diagnose your connection issues. Please use our mm-network-analyzer program, which is designed to aid in diagnosing networking issues. It creates a zip file containing various network checks like traceroute, DNS, etc. You can download the latest version, run it, and send the resulting zip file to our support team for review.

Please note, mm-network-analyzer is not compatible with Windows, but you can reach out to support with the following information (if available to you) to help us investigate an issue:

• Your requesting server’s IP address
• Which web service demonstrates the issue
• What integration method you’re using for that web service
• Any full error messages you’re receiving
• Date and time frame (including time zone) that you experienced the issue
• Your traceroute to geoip.maxmind.com

You can submit your support request on our knowledge base.

Command Line (curl) Examples

The web service may be accessed using curl, a simple command-line HTTP client. The -u flag is used to pass the HTTP basic authentication header that provides the web service with your credentials.

For the following examples, replace {account_id} and {license_key} (including the brackets) with your account ID and license key, and replace {ip_address} with the IP address you wish to look up.

GeoIP Country

1# Retrieve data for your IP address.
2curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
3  "https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.1/country/me?pretty"
4
5# Retrieve data for an arbitrary IP address.
6curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
7  "https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.1/country/{ip_address}?pretty"

GeoIP City Plus

1# Retrieve data for your IP address.
2curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
3  "https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.1/city/me?pretty"
4
5# Retrieve data for an arbitrary IP address.
6curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
7  "https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.1/city/{ip_address}?pretty"

GeoIP Insights

1# Retrieve data for your IP address.
2curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
3  "https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.1/insights/me?pretty"
4
5# Retrieve data for an arbitrary IP address.
6curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
7  "https://geoip.maxmind.com/geoip/v2.1/insights/{ip_address}?pretty"

GeoLite2 Country

1# Retrieve data for your IP address.
2curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
3  "https://geolite.info/geoip/v2.1/country/me?pretty"
4
5# Retrieve data for an arbitrary IP address.
6curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
7  "https://geolite.info/geoip/v2.1/country/{ip_address}?pretty"

GeoLite2 City

1# Retrieve data for your IP address.
2curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
3  "https://geolite.info/geoip/v2.1/city/me?pretty"
4
5# Retrieve data for an arbitrary IP address.
6curl -u "{account_id}:{license_key}" \
7  "https://geolite.info/geoip/v2.1/city/{ip_address}?pretty"

IP Geolocation Accuracy

Use the Accuracy Radius as an indication of geolocation accuracy for the latitude and longitude coordinates we return for an IP address. The actual location of the IP address is likely within the area defined by this radius and the latitude and longitude coordinates.

Versioning

The GeoIP2 web services use two part versions. Our current release is version 2.1. The major version number will remain at 2 for the foreseeable future and will not change unless we are releasing an entirely new product (“GeoIP3”).

The minor version will only change if there are breaking changes in the web service. A breaking change is one that breaks client code that follows the documentation on this page. Breaking changes include changing the type of an existing field, deleting a field entirely, or changing URIs.

All changes to the web services will be documented in the GeoIP2 release notes, whether or not the version number is changed.

The following changes are not considered to be breaking changes and will not be accompanied by a version number change:

• Adding a new field, either at the top level of the structure or in one particular object such as the country or city. Client code should be written to allow for new fields to appear.
• Adding new values to enum fields such as user_type. Note that this also applies to fields such as country codes, country subdivision codes, time zones, etc.
• Adding a new language for localized names. We may add additional locale codes in the future.
• Adding or removing error codes, and/or changing the body type for an error. Client code should always check the Content-Type header for any error response. Client code should also be prepared to handle any valid HTTP 4xx or 5xx status code.
• Adding a new service. If we add a GeoIP2 Inter-Galactic service, we will use a new path such as /geoip/v2.1/inter-galactic. This should not break any existing client code.