Introduction to python-geoip

There is a third-party library called python-geoip, which has a robust interface to answer your IP location query.

You can find more information about this package on the developer's website: http://pythonhosted.org/python-geoip. You can install the package directly from the Python repository.

If you are working with Python 3, you need to install python-geoip-python3 (https://pypi.org/project/python-geoip-python3). This is a fork of python-geoip with Python 3 support. We also need to install the geolite2 module with the pip install python-geoip-geolite2 command:

pip install python-geoip-python3

In the following script, we can see an example of how to use the python-geoip package. You can find the following code in the geoip_lookup.py file:

!/usr/bin/env python3

import socket
from geoip import geolite2
import argparse
import json

# Setup commandline arguments
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Get IP Geolocation info')
parser.add_argument('--hostname', action="store", dest="hostname", required=True)

# Parse arguments
given_args = parser.parse_args()
hostname = given_args.hostname
ip_address = socket.gethostbyname(hostname)

print("IP address: {0}".format(ip_address))

match = geolite2.lookup(ip_address)

if match is not None:
 print('Country: ',match.country)
 print('Continent: ',match.continent)
 print('Time zone: ', match.timezone)
 print('Location: ', match.location)

This script will show an output similar to the following:

 $ python geoip_lookup.py --hostname=amazon.co.uk
IP address: 176.32.98.166
Country:  US
Continent:  NA
Time zone:  None
Location:  (38.0, -97.0)