Python get visitor information by IP address

In this post, you will learn how to get visitor full information, like Country, State, Region, Timezone, Latitude, Longitude and so on, using the visitor's IP address in Python programming language.

IP stands for "Internet Protocol", which is the set of rules governing the format of data sent via the internet or local network. An IP address is a unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network.

The site visitor's information is so important. By using this, you can easily know about the geographical locations of users. You can also show or hide the visitors from particular countries. You can also store visitor's information in the database to make your own analytics report.

Python Socket

A socket is one endpoint of two communication links. An endpoint is a combination of an IP address and a port number. So first, we need a socket module to get the current visitor’s IP address. This module provides the gethostname() and gethostbyname() methods to get the visitor's hostname and IP address respectively.

import socket
host_name = socket.gethostname() 
host_ip = socket.gethostbyname(host_name) 

Python urllib package

We also need the json module to convert the data in JSON format and urllib package to collect its module for working with urls. In this article, we have used the following modules-
urllib.request- for opening and reading urls.
urllib.parse- for parsing urls
urllib.error- containing the exceptions.

Complete Code: Python get visitor information by IP address

Here is the complete Python code to get current visitor information by IP address. We are using the 'geoplugin' API. The information received by the third party is not more readable. So, we have decoded them using the decode() function.

import urllib.request, urllib.parse, urllib.error
import json, socket

host_name = socket.gethostname() 
host_ip = socket.gethostbyname(host_name) 
serviceurl = 'http://www.geoplugin.net/json.gp?ip='+host_ip

print('Retrieving', serviceurl)
uh = urllib.request.urlopen(serviceurl)
data = uh.read().decode()
print('Retrieved', len(data), 'characters')
js = json.loads(data)
print(data)

Related Articles