Create an IP to location web service

In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to create an IP to location index and then serve it in a simple web application.

Dataset

The data used to create an IP to location index is publicly available from the Internet routing registries (IRRs) (opens in a new tab) which includes the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) (opens in a new tab)

The data are formatted following RPSL (opens in a new tab) specifications and contain records that link IP address ranges to organisations along with some metadata.

Generate the index

cd examples/ip-to-location
baremaps workflow execute --file workflow.js

The workflow executed in the above command does the following:

• Download and decompress the data from the IRRs
• Download and create a Geocoding index (see the Geocoding example)
• Iterate over every entry in the registries to extract the IP address ranges and the associated metadata to query the Geocoding index and extract a latitude and a longitude.

Serve the data

baremaps iploc serve --database iploc.db --port 9000

A simple web application serves the Geonames index. Go to http://localhost:9000/ (opens in a new tab) to see it in action.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learnt how to create an IP to location index and serve it in a simple web application. IP to location has many uses, one of which is to locate users that connect to a website to generate statistics.