Free GeoIp location web service

1 minute read
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This weekend I found a really cool web service at FreeGeoIp.net. Their API is really simple… just send a HTTP GET request to:

http://freegeoip.net/{format}/{ip_or_hostname}

Here are some of the implementation details:

  1. SSL is supported
  2. Formats are csv, json, and xml
  3. IP is optional. It defaults to your current IP.

I quickly implemented a comnmand line client written in Python 3. It uses the awesome requests library and ElementTree to parse the resulting XML response. Here’s the code…

def main():
    args = parse_args()

    MYIP_URL = 'http://freegeoip.net/xml/'
    MYIP_HEADERS = {'Accept': 'application/xml'}

    if args.ip is not None:
        MYIP_URL = MYIP_URL + args.ip

    rspn = requests.get(MYIP_URL, headers=MYIP_HEADERS)
    tree = etree.ElementTree(etree.fromstring(rspn.text))
    root = tree.getroot()

    ip = root.find('Ip')
    cntr = root.find('CountryName')
    reg = root.find('RegionName')
    city = root.find('City')

    print('Your Current IP: %s' % ip.text)
    print('You appear to be in %s, %s, %s' % (city.text, reg.text, cntr.text))

Or you can get the whole code from my github profile.