Free geographical location and currency of website visitors

Many of the applications I have worked with wanted to know the location of it's users. Until know, my way to go to gather this information was using some geoip api wrapped by laravel-geoip. It's a simple to use this lib: just setup the environment variables of the api you choose and start collecting user location based on their ips.

geoip(request()->ip());

It's a nice solution and works fine for small websites. But it has downsides for production workloads: rate limit and latency.

So, recently I was wondering.. Cloudflare shows the location of every request made to a website. Wouldn't be nice if they just provide that information straight in the request?? Indeed, they do!

I discovered the cf-ipcountry header in the Cloudflare docs . It gives the iso code of the country where the request was made. It's really nice information, comes for free with a Cloudflare setup and has a really good accuracy (except if a request was made under VPN).

The docs also mention that if you need more geolocation data, you can just enable a feature on you domain called managed transformations. It provides: "cf-region-code", "cf-region", "cf-postal-code", "cf-iplongitude", "cf-iplatitude", "cf-ipcountry", "cf-ipcontinent", "cf-ipcity", "cf-timezone"! All of that with zero latency on your request and, I believe, a really good accuracy. Only currency is not provided. But currency is directly related to a country so a simple dictionary with country iso code => currency solves the problem. The same applies if you need the country name.

<?php
 
namespace App;
 
use Spatie\LaravelData\Data;
 
class GuestId extends Data
{
    public string $country;
    public string $currency;
 
    public function __construct(
        public string $ip,
        public string $iso_code,
        public string $city,
        public string $state,
        public string $state_name,
        public string $postal_code,
        public string $lat,
        public string $lon,
        public string $timezone,
        public string $continent,
    ) {
 
        $this->country = $this->defineCountry();
        $this->currency = $this->defineCurrency();
    }
 
    public static function fromRequest(): self
    {
        // although cloudflare always send these headers, I really like to have defaults in place.
        // just in case..
        return self::from([
            'ip' => request()->ip(),
            'iso_code' => request()->header('cf-ipcountry', 'BR'),
            'city' => request()->header('cf-ipcity', 'São Paulo'),
            'state' => request()->header('cf-region-code', 'SP'),
            'state_name' => request()->header('cf-region', 'São Paulo'),
            'postal_code' => request()->header('cf-postal-code', '20000-000'),
            'lat' => request()->header('cf-iplatitude', '-22.8777'),
            'lon' => request()->header('cf-iplongitude', '-43.3078'),
            'timezone' => request()->header('cf-timezone', 'America/Sao_Paulo'),
            'continent' => request()->header('cf-ipcontinent', 'SA'),
        ]);
    }
 
    protected function defineCountry()
    {
        return config('countries.iso_code.' . strtoupper($this->iso_code), 'Brazil');
    }
 
    protected function defineCurrency()
    {
        return strtolower(config(
            'countries.currency.' . strtoupper($this->iso_code),
            config('stripe.foreign_location')
        ));
    }
}

After this solution, I no longer use geoip apis! A few of the benefits were:
1. No more rate limits. If my site suffer an DDoS's, I don't loose track of my real customers.
2. No more extra latency. In fact, I didn't have this before because I offload the operation in a Laravel Job.
3. No more inaccuracy. Many requests failed and I loose track of the visitors location.

There's one downside to this approach. If you have multiple domains in your application you need to enable this feature in all of them.