GeoIP is a very important addition to projects, moreover keeping the GeoIP databases up-to-date. I’ll be using pygeoip python API along with Maxmind binary databases to create a simple python script that returns country name according to the supplied IP address.

First of all to maintain an up-to-date version of the GeoIP databases from Maxmind, I wrote the following BASH script (maxmind.sh)

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#!/bin/sh
GeoIP_DIR="/home/draco/GeoIP"
echo $(date +%Y%m%d)
wget -cN --limit-rate=30k -P $GeoIP_DIR  http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCountry/GeoIP.dat.gz
wget -cN --limit-rate=30k -P $GeoIP_DIR  http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
wget -cN --limit-rate=30k -P $GeoIP_DIR  http://download.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/asnum/GeoIPASNum.dat.gz
gunzip -k $GeoIP_DIR/*.gz
mv -f $GeoIP_DIR/*.dat /usr/local/share/GeoIP/
echo "DONE"

You could omit the GeoLiteCity and GeoIPASNum if not interested. This shell script will check the Maxmind website for a new version of the currently downloaded databases if any, then it extracts it into /usr/local/share/GeoIP/ to be accessed from the python script.

It’s propably best to create a crontab job to check updates every week or even daily, according to your requirements.

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$ crontab -e

Then add the cronjob, for example to run it every week on Sundays I use the following command,

—make sure you have created /var/log/GeoIP.log

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0 0 * * 0 /home/draco/GeoIP/maxmind.sh >> /var/log/GeoIP.log

Now to the python script (geoip.py), which is based on pygeoip, it takes one argument “IP” and returns full version name of country + ISO shortcode.

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#coding: utf-8
#!/usr/local/bin/python

import sys
import pygeoip

gi4 = pygeoip.GeoIP('/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat', pygeoip.MEMORY_CACHE)
ip = sys.argv[1]
code = gi4.country_code_by_addr(ip)
name = gi4.country_name_by_addr(ip)

print code + ' -- ' + name

Usage as follows,

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$ python geoip.py 98.139.183.24

That’s pretty much it.