Geolocate an IP address using Web Services

Geolocating an IP address using GeoIP2 or GeoLite2 web services consists of configuring a web service client, creating a request, and handling the response.

Implementation

MaxMind offers and highly recommends using official client libraries to access our geolocation services. If you cannot or do not wish to use our client libraries, please review our GeoIP2 API Documentation page for details on our REST API.

1. Install the GeoIP2 client library

We have a collection of officially supported libraries for you to interact with the GeoIP2 and GeoLite2 APIs:

2. Create and configure a GeoIP2 client object

To interact with our API, you need to create a new client object. For this you will need your MaxMind account ID and license key. Our clients also allow you to interact with our GeoLite2 API, but this requires additional configuration as demonstrated below:

3. Query the desired geolocation service

GeoIP2 offers 3 services: Insights, City Plus, and Country. GeoLite2 offers 2 services: City and Country. Each client library has an appropriately named method for accessing the desired geolocation service.

Client APIs

You can find a complete list of official and third-party client APIs on the web services documentation page.

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.

This page was last updated on March 25, 2024.