Setup GeoIP with NginX & PHP

Setup GeoIP with NginX & PHP

On my Ubuntu machine I located the GeoIP.dat file. If not available then download/intall the same.

root@localhost:~# locate GeoIP.dat
/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat

Open Nginx configuration (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf) and specify <geoip_country> <path to GeoIP.dat> 
line under the "http" block. Example block:

http {
        # SS - meant to find country code from the client IP
        geoip_country /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat;
        geoip_city /etc/nginx/geoip/GeoLiteCity.dat;
....

I only required GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE, but you can add many more like GEOIP_COUNTRY_NAME, GEOIP_REGION, 
GEOIP_CITY, GEOIP_POSTAL_CODE, GEOIP_CITY_CONTINENT_CODE, GEOIP_LATITUDE, GEOIP_LONGITUDE etc. 
depending on what all *.dat files you have specified inside http block. See http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpGeoipModule.

To make these variables available to PHP, add fastcgi_param directives inside /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params 
i.e. add all params that you want the fastcgi to forward to PHP. I added for GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE.

### SET GEOIP Variables ###
fastcgi_param GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE        $geoip_country_code;

Now add "include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;" in your location block - one that serves your PHP code. 
Example:

location ~ \.php$ {
    if (!-e $request_filename) {
        return 404;
    }
    fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
    include         fastcgi_params;
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
}

Restart the php5-cgi process (use netstat -tap to find the PID). To test, I added the following location 
block and let Nginx echo the user country code.

# Testing GeoIP
location ^~ /geoip/ {
    add_header Content-Type application/json;
    if ($geoip_country_code ~ "IN") {
        echo '{"key":"india","country":"$geoip_country_code"}';
    }
    if ($geoip_country_code !~ "IN") {
          echo '{"key":"global","country":"$geoip_country_code"}';
    }
}