Motivation

You have a site (say http://www.example.com), with different subdomain or urls mapped for users from different countries. In this example, we’ll assume something along these lines:

• http://ca.example.com (for users from Canada)
• http://jp.example.com (for users from Japan)

If you are using Apache httpd to serve your website, you can use mod_geoip to make the redirect happen.

In this tutorial, you are assumed to be using Ubuntu with apache to serve your website.

Installing mod_geoip for Apache in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-geoip

This will automatically install Maxmind’s geoip module and enable it.

Using mod_geoip in httpd.conf or .htaccess

Below is a snippet of code showing an example configuration using geoip. In the example, the user will be redirect to http://ca.example.com if they are from Canada and http://jp.example.com if they are from Japan. The redirect syntax is regular apache mod_rewrite syntax (i.e. you can use regular expression and group matching to better redirect).

    GeoIPEnable On
    GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^CA$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ca.example.com

    RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^JP$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://jp.example.com

You can find the list of countries available at: http://www.maxmind.com/app/iso3166

Sources for this tutorial:

• Install mod_geoip for Apache2 on Ubuntu 9.10
• MaxMind – ISO 3166 Country Codes