IP to Country console command

Question

Is there a console command that takes an IP address as an input and shows its geographical information like city, country, ISP, etc.?

score 75 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 01 '14 at 23:41

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This trick is even nicer and doesn't require any external packages:

curl ipinfo.io/23.66.166.151

edited Jul 01 '14 at 23:41

drs

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answered Jul 01 '14 at 23:01

zmonteca

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In case ipinfo.io gets offline someday, ifconfig.me provides a similar service (plus a REST-like API). But ifonfo.io seems much faster. – cedbeu Mar 05 '15 at 15:48
Meh, doesn't allow hostnames... – m3nda Mar 11 '16 at 04:47
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$ host yourdomain.com | cut -d ' ' -f 4 | curl ipinfo.io/$1 – zmonteca Mar 22 '16 at 15:57
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ipinfo.io is free for 1000 requests/day (see their [pricing documentation](http://ipinfo.io/pricing)). – Matthieu Nov 14 '16 at 15:03
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Another alternative: `curl ipinfo.io/$(dig +short yourdomain.com)` – John Red Dec 07 '16 at 17:00
@Matthieu I haven't hit 1000 limit but I'm planning to script it to check some IP addresses periodically during the day. Have you hit 1000 and blocked from doing more requests? – Jan 07 '17 at 10:08
@sdkks I'm not using it in a script, only from time to time when I need it. I took the limit from their documentation. – Matthieu Jan 07 '17 at 11:47
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If someone ever hits the ceiling on the ipinfo.io API (lucky you?), there is also https://freegeoip.net/ which has a mind-blowing 15,000 requests per hour limit. (Which under the hood seems to be running the geoiplookup from the other answers) – samthecodingman Mar 09 '17 at 13:52
10.000 requests/mo now for freegeoip.net – Imaskar Sep 20 '18 at 08:53
If you have 'jq' here's a fun one-liner :: `curl -qs http://ipinfo.io/$(curl -qs http://ipinfo.io/ip) | jq -r '. | "\(.city), \(.country)"';` Produces "Reykjavik, IS" for me. – Martin Bramwell Mar 29 '23 at 16:50

score 30 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 20 '21 at 10:22

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The command is the easy part, the difficult part is having access to a database.

For example, Ubuntu has a free database with a command line query tool (geoiplookup) in the geoip-bin Install geoip-bin .package. But it only shows country information, and uses a static (hence out-of-date) database. This tool can also query the MaxMind GeoIP database, if you have a subscription there.

There are various GeoIP databases that you can look up. They're generally meant to be viewed through a web browser, but you can look for a scraping script. For example, here's a ruby script to retrieve data from the MaxMind database. Note that scraping may be against the database's terms of service.

edited Jul 20 '21 at 10:22

answered Feb 14 '11 at 20:01

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

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just used the ubuntu **geoiplookup** and it is good enough. – BuZain Feb 15 '11 at 17:57
CentOS# yum install GeoIP – zmonteca Jul 01 '14 at 22:50
@StephenRauch Thanks but please use the official replacement for the broken bit.ly link: https://hostmar.co/software-small – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Apr 03 '17 at 00:23
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@StephenRauch The apt link only works with a browser plug-in that's part of the default Ubuntu installation but rarely installed otherwise. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Apr 03 '17 at 00:29
These are in Homebrew for Mac as well: `geoipupdate; geoiplookup ...` – Pysis Nov 25 '18 at 17:06
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/269787/homebrew-installed-geoiplookup-shows-no-output-howto-install-geoip-data – Pysis Nov 25 '18 at 17:12

score 10 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 17 '19 at 23:52

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Or use whois

$ whois 8.8.8.8 |grep country -i -m 1 |cut -d ':' -f 2 |xargs US

answered Jun 17 '19 at 23:52

Daniel

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score 9 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 30 '15 at 02:59

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Here's another great option. Instructions here: http://kbeezie.com/geoiplookup-command-line/

For example, on Centos:

$ sudo yum install GeoIP GeoIP-data
$ geoiplookup 8.8.4.4

Works perfectly.

And of course, you can always set this up as a cron:

$ /usr/bin/geoipupdate

edited Sep 30 '15 at 02:59

slm

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answered Apr 25 '15 at 06:01

zinger

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[`geoipupdate`](https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoipupdate/) is a MaxMind tool, you need a subscription and the licence key on `/etc/GeoIP.conf`. I couldn't use the [free alternative](https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoipupdate/#For_Free_GeoLite2_Databases) (_Received an unexpected HTTP status code of 401_). – Pablo A Mar 09 '18 at 22:47

score 1 · Answer 5 · edited Jul 20 '21 at 10:17

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Here is my little command line tool called "gip":

https://github.com/softhub-software-development/gip

# gip -h

usage: gip [-C] [-c] [-g] [-h] [-tT] [ip-address-or-domain ...]
gip invoked with no arguments starts the gip server
-C print country
-c print city
-g print geo coordinates only
-d print domain info if possible
-h print this help information
-t trace route omitting duplicates
-T trace route

In server-mode it renders a map with pin heads indicating the origin of requests.

edited Jul 20 '21 at 10:17

chris

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answered Jun 20 '21 at 09:16

user478203

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What database does it use under the hood? – HappyFace Jun 20 '21 at 12:34
It's using https://lite.ip2location.com/ip2location-lite (DB11·LITE to be precise) but includes only a few ip ranges for testing in the repository. You need to download the .csv yourself and generate the dataset which takes about 10 minutes on a raspberry pi. – chris Jul 18 '21 at 18:05

IP to Country console command

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