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Comment by louison11

2 years ago

If you don't want to do this yourself, you can actually just get Cloudflare to do it for you for free using a simple Worker since all Cloudflare requests contain approximate IP location information.

You can also just send a request to my URL (Cloudflare Worker operated - so it should have global low latency): https://www.edenmaps.net/iplocation

Use it for small applications, I don't mind. Just don't start sending me 10M requests per day ;-)

19 comments

louison11

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Aachen  2 years ago

Or you download an IP database rather than sharing with a third party which IP address is likely connecting to your service with a third party

hotgeart  2 years ago

Located 100km from the Somali coast... I'm in Brussels, Belgium, thx for protecting my privacy :D

emadda  2 years ago

Does anyone know how accurate Cloudflare geolocation is (for workers requests)?

  • banana_giraffe  2 years ago

    As accurate as MaxMind[1], since that's what they use [2]. In my experience, it's reasonably accurate for the US, less so for other countries. MaxMind publishes some accuracy data which might be an interesting starting point [3]

    That said, for any analytics use cases of this data, be aware that MaxMind will group a lot of what should be unknowns in the middle of a country. Or, in the case the US now, I think they all end up in the middle of some lake, since some farm owners in Butler County, Kansas got tired of cops showing up and sued MaxMind. It can cause odd artifacts unless you filter the addresses out somehow.

    1 https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/network/configurin...

    2 https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo

    3 https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-accuracy-comparison

    • matwood  2 years ago

      Yeah, MaxMind is the best I have used with caveats. You need to update it frequently, and you need to allow for overrides.

  • reincoder  2 years ago

    I work for IPinfo and we do ping based geolocation. The best thing you can do to verify geolocation accuracy is the following:

    - Download a few free IP databases - Generate a random list of IP addresses - Do the IP address lookups across all those databases - Identify the IP address that can be pinged - Visit a site that can ping an IP address from multiple server - Sort the results by lowest avg ping time

    Then check where the geolocation provider is locating the IP address and what is the nearest server from there.

tiffanyh  2 years ago

This is excellent!

Would you mind open sourcing the code for that?

  • louison11  2 years ago

    This is the code running this endpoint:

      export function onRequest(context) {
    return new Response(JSON.stringify([parseFloat(context.request.cf.longitude), parseFloat(context.request.cf.latitude)]), {headers: {"Content-Type": "application/json;charset=UTF-8"}})
  }

    This is a function on Cloudflare Pages (which is just a different name for Cloudflare Workers). Minor adjustment needed for Workers (get rid of "context", I believe)