IPinfo Rails Client Library

This is the official Rails client library for the IPinfo.io IP address API, allowing you to look up your own IP address, or get any of the following details for an IP:

• Geolocation (city, region, country, postal code, latitude, and longitude)
• ASN (ISP or network operator, associated domain name, and type, such as business, hosting, or company)
• Company (the name and domain of the business that uses the IP address)
• Carrier (the name of the mobile carrier and MNC and MCC for that carrier if the IP is used exclusively for mobile traffic)

Check all the data we have for your IP address here.

Getting Started

You'll need an IPinfo API access token, which you can get by signing up for a free account at https://ipinfo.io/signup.

The free plan is limited to 50,000 requests per month, and doesn't include some of the data fields such as IP type and company data. To enable all the data fields and additional request volumes see https://ipinfo.io/pricing

Installation

1. Option 1) Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

   gem 'ipinfo-rails'

   Then execute:

   $ bundle install

   Option 2) Install it yourself by running the following command:

   $ gem install ipinfo-rails

2. Open your config/environment.rb file or your preferred file in the config/environment directory. Add the following code to your chosen configuration file.

   require 'ipinfo-rails'
   config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {token: "<your_token>"})

   Note: if editing config/environment.rb, this needs to come before Rails.application.initialize! and with Rails.application. prepended to config, otherwise you'll get runtime errors.

3. Restart your development server.

Quickstart

Once configured, ipinfo-rails will make IP address data accessible within Rail's request object. These values can be accessed at request.env['ipinfo'].

Details Data

request.env['ipinfo'] is Response object that contains all fields listed IPinfo developer docs with a few minor additions. Properties can be accessed through methods of the same name.

request.env['ipinfo'].hostname == 'cpe-104-175-221-247.socal.res.rr.com'

Country Name

request.env['ipinfo'].country_name will return the country name, as supplied by the countries.json file. See below for instructions on changing that file for use with non-English languages. request.env['ipinfo'].country will still return country code.

request.env['ipinfo'].country == 'US'
request.env['ipinfo'].country_name == 'United States'

IP Address

request.env['ipinfo'].ip_address will return the an IPAddr object from the Ruby Standard Library. request.env['ipinfo'].ip will still return a string.

request.env['ipinfo'].ip == '104.175.221.247'
request.env['ipinfo'].ip_address == <IPAddr: IPv4:104.175.221.247/255.255.255.255>

Longitude and Latitude

request.env['ipinfo'].latitude and request.env['ipinfo'].longitude will return latitude and longitude, respectively, as strings. request.env['ipinfo'].loc will still return a composite string of both values.

request.env['ipinfo'].loc == '34.0293,-118.3570'
request.env['ipinfo'].latitude == '34.0293'
request.env['ipinfo'].longitude == '-118.3570'

Accessing all properties

request.env['ipinfo'].all will return all details data as a hash.

request.env['ipinfo'].all ==
{
:asn => {  :asn => 'AS20001',
           :domain => 'twcable.com',
           :name => 'Time Warner Cable Internet LLC',
           :route => '104.172.0.0/14',
           :type => 'isp'},
:city => 'Los Angeles',
:company => {  :domain => 'twcable.com',
               :name => 'Time Warner Cable Internet LLC',
               :type => 'isp'},
:country => 'US',
:country_name => 'United States',
:hostname => 'cpe-104-175-221-247.socal.res.rr.com',
:ip => '104.175.221.247',
:ip_address => <IPAddr: IPv4:104.175.221.247/255.255.255.255>,
:loc => '34.0293,-118.3570',
:latitude => '34.0293',
:longitude => '-118.3570',
:phone => '323',
:postal => '90016',
:region => 'California'
}

Configuration

In addition to the steps listed in the Installation section, it is possible to configure the library with more detail. The following arguments are allowed and are described in detail below.

require 'ipinfo-rails/ip_selector/xforwarded_ip_selector'

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {
  token: "<your_token>",
  ttl: "",
  maxsize: "",
  cache: "",
  http_client: "",
  countries: "",
  filter: "",
  ip_selector: XForwardedIPSelector,
})

IP Selection Mechanism

By default, the source IP on the request is used as the input to IP geolocation.

Since the actual desired IP may be something else, the IP selection mechanism is configurable.

Here are some built-in mechanisms:

• DefaultIPSelector
• XForwardedIPSelector

Using a custom IP selector

In case a custom IP selector is required, you may implement the IPSelectorInterface and pass the class to ip_selector in config.

require 'custom-package/custom_ip_selector'

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {
  token: "<your_token>",
  ip_selector: CustomIPSelector,
})

Authentication

The IPinfo library can be authenticated with your IPinfo API token, which is set in the environment file. It also works without an authentication token, but in a more limited capacity.

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {token: '123456789abc'})

Caching

In-memory caching of details data is provided by default via the lrucache gem. This uses an LRU (least recently used) cache with a TTL (time to live) by default. This means that values will be cached for the specified duration; if the cache's max size is reached, cache values will be invalidated as necessary, starting with the oldest cached value.

Modifying cache options

Cache behavior can be modified by setting the ttl and maxsize options.

• Default maximum cache size: 4096 (multiples of 2 are recommended to increase efficiency)
• Default TTL: 24 hours (in seconds)

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {
  ttl: 30,
  maxsize: 40
})

Using a different cache

It's possible to use a custom cache by creating a child class of the CacheInterface class and passing this into the handler object with the cache keyword argument. FYI this is known as the Strategy Pattern.

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {:cache => my_fancy_custom_class})

If a custom cache is used the maxsize and ttl settings will not be used.

Using a different HTTP library

Ruby is notorious for having lots of HTTP libraries. While Net::HTTP is a reasonable default, you can set any other that Faraday supports if you prefer.

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {:http_client => my_client})

Don't forget to bundle the custom HTTP library as well.

Internationalization

When looking up an IP address, the response object includes a Details.country_name method which includes the country name based on American English. It is possible to return the country name in other languages by setting the countries setting when creating the IPinfo object.

The file must be a .json file with the following structure:

{
 "BD": "Bangladesh",
 "BE": "Belgium",
 "BF": "Burkina Faso",
 "BG": "Bulgaria"
 ...
}

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {:countries => <path_to_settings_file>})

Filtering

By default, ipinfo-rails filters out requests that have bot or spider in the user-agent. Instead of looking up IP address data for these requests, the request.env['ipinfo'] attribute is set to nil. This is to prevent you from unnecessarily using up requests on non-user traffic.

To set your own filtering rules, thereby replacing the default filter, you can set :filter to your own, custom callable function which satisfies the following rules:

• Accepts one request.
• Returns True to filter out, False to allow lookup

To use your own filter rules:

config.middleware.use(IPinfoMiddleware, {
  filter: ->(request) {request.ip == '127.0.0.1'}
})

This simple lambda function will filter out requests coming from your local computer.

Other Libraries

There are official IPinfo client libraries available for many languages including PHP, Go, Java, Ruby, and many popular frameworks such as Django, Rails, and Laravel. There are also many third-party libraries and integrations available for our API.

About IPinfo

Founded in 2013, IPinfo prides itself on being the most reliable, accurate, and in-depth source of IP address data available anywhere. We process terabytes of data to produce our custom IP geolocation, company, carrier, privacy detection (VPN, proxy, Tor), hosted domains, and IP type data sets. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month for 100,000 businesses and developers.