Getting Geolocation for free using the IP Gelocation API

Businesses and internet businesses in particular cater to different people spread across geographies. Key to their efforts in growing their business is understanding where their customers come from along with their language, culture, purchase behaviour and so on.In short, getting hold of Geolocation data will help companies to better target and serve their offshore customers.

For instance, a Japanese customer could be served by translating the language of the website to Japanese. But more often than not, clients hiring PHP developers end up spending a lot on this task because geolocation is costly to implement, thereby leaving small companies outside its scope.

Our dedicated PHP developers at HireIndianProgrammers have provided a gamut of PHP development services to our clients for many years now. Given our experience, in this blogpost, our PHP developers discuss how to get Geolocation data for free with the help of IP Gelocation API and PHP Code.

We recommend using PHP code rather than Javascript since it gives room for developers to do more customisation. Firstly, create a new file named “location.php” and save it and open the PHP file. What follows is the establishment of a simple PHP function whose purpose is to grab the location of the IP address of the visiting customer. Even if a client is hiring a PHP developer with limited experience or if he is a freelancer, this procedure is easy enough to implement. Our developer team suggests that PHP programmers keenly follow the instructions.

After opening a PHP function with a parameter variable for IP address, create a new variable that stores PHP’s built in cURL to get data from the API. This will invariably start a session. The next task is to set the options for the same cURL session in order to load the corresponding URL (1st) for that IP address (2nd). As any PHP Developer would know, output in the first instance must be converted to intelligible string and we ask you to do the same. This string must then be stored into a new variable.

Now it is time for PHP developers to return the data retrieved from the function. It is upto the discretion of the corresponding client hiring the PHP Developer on how and when to call the function and output the geolocation using PHP’s echo. One thing our PHP programmers would exhort is to convert the JSON string into an object that can be accessed. This must be done to output the relevant parts of the data. There are some clients who hire PHP Programmers who would want real time information about who is accessing their website. This can again be accomplished by writing a simple PHP code employing the $_Server[“REMOTE_ADDR”] functionality inside the function that calls the IP address.

We hope that you found this blogpost to be informative. Get started in your PHP development process by first checking out our team at HireIndianProgrammers, their credentials, area of expertise and previous work.

If you are impressed with our work, you can then proceed to hire a PHP Developer  from HireIndianProgrammers. For further queries, contact us here.