Get IP Geolocation with PHP

There is no build in way or tool in PHP to get geographical location of an IP address. Thats why, we will need to use a third party api to get geographical location of an IP address.

There are many free and paid Geo apis are available today to get geolocation from an IP address. In this post I will use freegeoip.net api. It is very simple and easy. We do not need to register for api key and the most impotent thing is this api is absolutely free!

The ip2location Function

function ip2location($ip)
{
    # api url
    $api = 'http://freegeoip.net/json/' . $ip;

    # connect api with curl
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $api);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    # return reposed data
    return json_decode($data);
}

Usages

$geo = ip2location('8.8.8.8');
$geo->ip;
$geo->country_name;
$geo->region_name;
$geo->city;
$geo->zipcode;
$geo->areacode;