AWS Lambda with MaxMind GeoLite2 IP database

The MaxMind GeoLite2 database is basically the standard solution when you need to get the geo information for an IP address. Together with the mmdb-reader NPM package you can easily deploy your own serverless API to AWS Lambda to lookup locations for IP addresses.

Thanks to AWS Lambda the deployed function can be used by other Lambda functions, or via HTTP using Amazon’s API Gateway.

Configuration

Just clone the serverless-geoip project from GitHub and install the needed dependencies:

$ > git clone git@github.com:sbstjn/serverless-geoip.git
$ > cd serverless-geoip
$ > yarn install

Afterwards, download the GeoLite2 City database and store the file inside the data folder.

.
└── data
    └── GeoLite2-City.mmdb

Usage

You can now deploy the project with serverless and send HTTP requests using cURL to lookup the geographical location of an IP address:

$ > yarn deploy

…

endpoints:
  GET - https://randomid.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/ip/{ip}

$ > curl https://randomid.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/ip/8.8.8.8

{"continent":{"code":"NA","geoname_id":6255149,"names":{"de":"Nordamerika","en":"North America", …

First I thought about caching the result in a DynamoDB or Redis, but querying the database is fast enough for now …