Random Musings of an Insane Mind

Almost every machine we run has geoip loaded and clients are able to access the country code of a surfer without having to write too much code. One client decided that they wanted to redirect users from certain states to another page to deal with sales tax and shipping issues but had a mixture of perl scripts and php scripts running their shopping cart.

Having done something very similar using mod_rewrite and rewritemap with a text file, the simple solution appeared to be a short Python script to interface with the GeoIPLite data and use mod_rewrite.

In our VirtualHost config, we put:

RewriteMap statecode prg:/var/www/rewritemap/tools/rewritemap.py

To set up our Python environment, we did:

virtualenv /var/www/rewritemap
cd /var/www/rewritemap
source bin/activate
git clone https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-python.git
cd geoip-api-python
python setup.py install
cd ..
mkdir tools
cd tools
wget -N http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz

rewritemap.py

#!/var/www/rewritemap/bin/python

import sys

import GeoIP
gi = GeoIP.open("/var/www/rewritemap/tools/GeoLiteCity.dat", \
         GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)

STATE = 'NULL'
gir = gi.record_by_name(sys.stdin.readline())
if gir != None:
  if gir['country_code'] == 'US':
    STATE = gir['region']

print STATE

Then, in our .htaccess we put:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond ${statecode:%{REMOTE_ADDR}|NONE} ^(PA|DC|CO)$
RewriteRule .* /specialpage/ [R=302,L]