working with maxmind geoip

Apr 20, 2019

scripting querys against the maxmind db’s with python

There comes a time when one needs to check for an IP’s likely physical location, in my case I’ve been playing with DNS of HTTPS and DNS over TLS and part of the workflow I had whilst testing was to check the responses GEO location against the free Maxmind database, but more on that another time.

So I downloaded the GeoLite2 (Free) City + ASN Databases from maxmind, install the prereq’s via pip and built a simple python script to test.

Found maxmind’s project maxmind (on github) that made building the script easier:

pip3 install geoip2 --user
brew install libmaxminddb
import geoip2.database
import json

# This creates a Reader object. You should use the same object
# across multiple requests as creation of it is expensive.
reader = geoip2.database.Reader('./GeoLite2-City_20190416/GeoLite2-City.mmdb')
reader2 = geoip2.database.Reader('/./GeoLite2-ASN_20190416/GeoLite2-ASN.mmdb')

# Replace "city" with the method corresponding to the database
# that you are using, e.g., "country".
ip = '72.163.4.185'
response = reader.city(ip)
response2 = reader2.asn(ip)

output = {
    "IP":ip, 
    "Details":
    [
        {"ISO":response.country.iso_code}, 
        {"Country":response.country.name}, 
        {"City":response.city.name},
        {"ASN":response2.autonomous_system_number}
        ]
    }

print (json.dumps(output, indent=4))

reader.close()