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The Boring Stuff

Now, I'm pretty sure there is or used to be a GeoIp component somewhere in CakeForge, but I haven't taken all that much of a look at it.

I came up with my own because I thought that in general the Maxmind pure PHP API was pretty dirty, limiting and quite unorganized.

This particular component contains a GeoIpComponent, and a set of vendor libraries provided by Maxmind, used for accessing Maxmind's free and commercial binary format country/city databases.

Some of my own vendor libraries are also included as a wrapper to Maxmind's pure PHP libraries. That's actually where most of the beauty of it lies. The actual Cake component simply provides a thin layer to access the wrapper API.

Interesting Features

Aside from the basic features of being able to obtain regional information (country name, city, postal code etc) about an address, but the component also comes packed with other features.

Here are most of the additional features:

• Directly resolve hostname to IP (makes regional lookup based on hostnames easier)
• Ability to export current lookup data as an XML string (might be good for making web services)
• Get a Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps URL for the current lookup data (based on latitude and longitude data)
• Unlike the original geoiprecord and geoipdnsrecord classes, camelCased property names are used for lookup data (more Cake-ish)

Currently those are the additional features, but hopefully I'll get feedback and suggestions and soon I'll be able to add a lot more features to the GeoIp component distribution.

The Technical Stuff

Currently the GeoIp component distribution is available for download via svn, on my private repository. If you would simply like to download only the distribution, you can do this:

$ svn export https://anon.svn.ariworks.co.kr/projects/geoip/trunk geoip_component

Or if you want to stay updated with the component, you can check out a working copy of the repository that you can later update with the "svn update" command:

$ svn checkout https://anon.svn.ariworks.co.kr/projects/geoip/trunk geoip_component

In either case, "geoip_component" can be any name of your liking.

If you've got yourself a copy of the distribution, you should take a look at it and you'll notice that the component follows a Cake application structure. You'll find geoip_component/app, geoip_component/app/{controllers,vendors} and more directories beneath each. Simply copy the files to the relevant path in your own application.

After all that, you're going to need to have a GeoIP database obtainable for free by Maxmind (or a better one, if you pay for it!). You'll want to get the binary format GeoLite City database (http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity) and put it in your APP/webroot/files directory. You can change the default path of the database file in APP/controllers/components/geo_ip.php, at the top of the file (modify the GeoIp.file configuration key).

Now let's get around to actually using the component. Let's say you have a GeoipController, that you would use just for testing the component.

Controller Class:

Download code <?php 
cclass GeoipController extends AppController {
    var $components = array('GeoIp');
    var $uses = array();
    
    function lookup($addr = null)
    {
        $GeoIpData = $this->GeoIp->lookup($addr, true);
        if (!$GeoIpData) {
            // Couldn't find anything or there was a problem with the IP.
            $this->render('some_error_view');
        }
        else {
            // Make available to the view our GeoIpData result.
            $this->set('geo', $GeoIpData);
        }
    }
}
?>
In that controller, we're looking up any address passed through a parameter to the lookup() action. The second argument (true) to the GeoIpComponent::lookup() method indicates that we want to automatically resolve IP addresses, just in-case a hostname was passed in as an argument. This allows for /geoip/lookup/google.com or /geoip/lookup/x.x.x.x type lookups.

Now let's make the "lookup.ctp" view file to display this data in:

View Template:

Download code
<pre>
    <?php echo h($geo->asXML()); ?>
</pre>

For now we'll only be showing our data as an XML string. You can always display individual data through properties, such as $geo->countryName, $geo->countryCode etc (and you can get the maps urls by $geo->googleMapsUrl() and $geo->yahooMapsUrl() methods).

And that's it! It's pretty simple :)

There are many libraries used by the component, but mainly you only need to know how to use GeoIpComponent and GeoIpData. If you've had a chance to try this example out, then you'll already know what all the properties are for GeoIpData, and you can use them as such: $geo->propertyName, where $geo is your GeoIpData instance and 'propertyName' is the name of the property you'd like to get the value for.

If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions, as usual I'm hanging around #cakephp on irc.freenode.net, or you can contact me by email at: shugotenshi at gmail dot com