February 04, 2024

Get Geolocation from an IP Address with an API in PHP

The Geolocation with IP address means identifying and retrieving the geographical location of a user from their IP address. Geolocation is mostly used to get the latitude/longitude of a user. Learn how to get geolocation from an IP address in PHP using an API service.

Get Geolocation from IP Address with API in PHP
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Geolocation is mostly used by web applications that serve localized content to users based on the user's IP address. In PHP, a user's IP address can be detected from the global $_SERVER variable. From a user's IP address, we can then fetch the location data like latitude, longitude, street, city and country code. In this post, we will learn how to get latitude, longitude, city, country and other data from a user's IP address using a Geolocation API. Files we are going to create for this post:

  1. geolocation.php: Contains two functions to get the user's IP address and fetch location data against that IP address.
  2. index.php: The HTML page containing the table with geolocation details.
  3. style.css: The CSS stylesheet for HTML and the table.
 

What is a Geolocation API?

A geolocation API is an external service that provides API endpoints to fetch geolocation data from a given IP address, such as the GeoJS and IPWHOIS.io API. We will use the IPWHOIS API endpoint in this post to get the country from the IP address and other data in PHP, as it provides detailed geographical data for a given IP Address. IPWHOIS is free and very simple to use to get IP location data in PHP.

  • Tier: No registration required. unlimited usage except for one request per second.
  • Provided Data: Latitude, Longitude, City, Country, Country Code and more.
  • API Endpoint: http://ipwhois.app/json/{ip}.

We are going to get users' geographical location data from their IP address using the IPWHOIS API.

 

How to Get User Location Data From IP Address in PHP?

To retrieve geographical information from an IP address, we need two PHP functions. First, we need a function to get the user's IP address from the $_SERVER variable. The second function to get geolocation data for the retrieved IP address. We create a file geolocation.php that will contain both functions to get the current user's IP address and then fetch the user's city and country and other data by IP.

  • Create a function get_client_ip_address() to fetch the current user's IP address.
  • Create a function get_geolocation_from_ip_address() to fetch geolocation data from the API for a given IP address.

geolocation.php

<?php
/**
 * @return string|null
 */
function get_client_ip_address(): ?string
{
    $client_ip_address = null;

    $ip_address = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'] ??
        $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] ??
        $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED'] ??
        $_SERVER['HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR'] ??
        $_SERVER['HTTP_FORWARDED'] ??
        $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

    foreach (explode(',', $ip_address) as $ip) {
        if (filter_var($ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_NO_RES_RANGE | FILTER_FLAG_NO_PRIV_RANGE)) {
            $client_ip_address = $ip;
            break;
        }
    }

    return $client_ip_address;
}

/**
 * @param string|null $ip_address
 * @return string|null
 */
function get_geolocation_from_ip_address(?string $ip_address): ?string
{

    $curl_handle = curl_init(sprintf('https://ipwhois.app/json/%s', $ip_address));

    // Return response instead of outputting
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    // Execute API request
    $curl_response = curl_exec($curl_handle);

    // Close cURL resource
    curl_close($curl_handle);

    return $curl_response;
}

Display User Location Data From IP Address (PHP)

After declaring the two required functions that need to get the user's geographical information, we can fetch and display country and other location data based on the user's IP. Steps to get city and country from IP Address in PHP with API request:

  • Get the user's IP Address and store it in a $client_ip_address variable.
  • Get geolocation data from the API using the $client_ip_address variable.
  • Decode the response from the API using the json_decode() function.
  • Display the geolocation data in an HTML table.

The API response has detailed data that can be used, but we are going to use the following mostly used geolocation data:

  • IP Address: ip.
  • Latitude: latitude.
  • Longitude: longitude.
  • City: city.
  • Region: region.
  • Country: country.
  • Country Code: country_code.
  • Country Capital: country_capital.
  • Dialing Code: country_phone.
  • Timezone: timezone.

index.php 

<?php
include_once 'functions.php';

$client_ip_address = get_client_ip_address();

$geolocation_data = json_decode(get_geolocation_from_ip_address($client_ip_address), true);
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Get Geolocation from IP Address with API in PHP - Demo</title>
        <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
        <meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1" name="viewport" />
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <section class="section py-4">
            <div class="container">
                <table class="table">
                    <thead>
                        <tr>
                            <th colspan="2">Geolocation Data</th>
                        </tr>
                    </thead>
                    <tbody>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left" style="width: 200px;">IP Address</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['ip']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Latitude</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['latitude']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Longitude</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['longitude'] ;?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">City</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['city']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Region</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['region']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Country</th>
                            <td>
                                <img src="<?= $geolocation_data['country_flag']; ?>" width="15" height="15" />
                                <?= $geolocation_data['country']; ?>
                            </td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Country Code</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['country_code']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Country Capital</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['country_capital']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Dialing Code</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['country_phone']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                            <th class="text-left">Timezone</th>
                            <td><?= $geolocation_data['timezone']; ?></td>
                        </tr>
                    </tbody>
                </table>
            </div>
        </section>
    </body>
</html>

Add CSS Styles for Geolocation Interface

Add CSS styles for the entire HTML page and the geolocation table.

style.css 

* {
    box-sizing: border-box;
}
html,body {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}
body {
    background-color: #f6f6f6;
    font-family: "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Helvetica", sans-serif;
    font-size: 15px;
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}
img {
    max-width: 100%;
    height: auto;
}
.container {
    max-width: 1024px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    padding-left: 15px;
    padding-right: 15px;
}
.py-4, .pt-4 {
    padding-top: 1rem;
}
.py-4, .pb-4 {
    padding-bottom: 1rem;
}
.text-left {
    text-align: left;
}
.table {
    display: table;
    width: 100%;
    border-collapse: collapse;
    background-color: #ffffff;
}
.table th, .table td {
    border-top: 1px solid #d1d5db;
}
.table th {
    font-weight: 600;
    padding: .75rem;
}
.table td {
    padding: 0.345rem .75rem;
}
 

We now have a working script that we can use to get the country from IP and other locations from the user's IP Address using an API. This is how the result will look like:

Get Geolocation from IP Address in PHP using API - 01
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