Upgrading to GeoIP Update 4.x

We recently released a new major version of geoipupdate. This document describes how you can upgrade from earlier versions.

What’s new

geoipupdate 4.x is a rewrite of the old geoipupdate and starts from a new modern code base. It supports the same core functionality and config file format as before.

The biggest change is support for additional platforms, notably Windows.

Notable changes

There are changes you should be aware of if you’re upgrading from older versions.

If you’re coming from geoipupdate 2.x:

• We removed support for the configuration options Protocol, SkipPeerVerification, and SkipHostnameVerification. geoipupdate now always uses HTTPS and always verifies certificates. We ignore these options if present.
• The configuration file must have the AccountID (or the deprecated UserId) when downloading a paid database. Previously, when downloading the GeoIP Legacy Country database, you were able to only provide the LicenseKey. Now you must provide both AccountID and LicenseKey.

Confirm your version

You can do this by running geoipupdate -V:

# geoipupdate -V
geoipupdate 3.1.1

If this says something like geoipupdate 4.0.0 then you’re already running 4.x.

If this says something like command not found then you may not have geoipupdate installed. Please see our documentation for information about installation.

Find your config file

Typically this will be /etc/GeoIP.conf or /usr/local/etc/GeoIP.conf.

One way to do this is to run geoipupdate in verbose mode:

# geoipupdate -v
geoipupdate 3.1.1
Opened License file /etc/GeoIP.conf
...

In this case the config file is /etc/GeoIP.conf.

Install geoipupdate 4.x

Follow the instructions in our documentation for how to do this.

If you previously installed it via our PPA, you should be able to upgrade through apt.

If you previously installed it via make install, you should determine where it’s installed so you don’t end up with conflicting versions. You can run this command to check where it is:

# which geoipupdate
/usr/bin/geoipupdate

In this case geoipupdate is installed to /usr/bin/geoipupdate so I’d want to install there again.

After you’ve installed it, confirm by running geoipupdate -V that you’re running 4.x.

Test it

Run geoipupdate in verbose mode to verify it’s using the config file you expect and completes without error:

$ geoipupdate -v
Using config file /etc/GeoIP.conf
...

If it’s using a config file from a different spot than you expect, either move your config to that location or pass the -f flag when running geoipupdate to tell it where to find the config.

Check cron

If you configured geoipupdate to run from cron then it is a good idea to confirm it will continue to work. In particular you should check the command in your cron configuration will use the config file you expect. You can run the command from your crontab with the verbose flag (-v) to verify this.