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How to configure .htaccess redirects based on Geo IP

by bernt & torsten

Recently I had a request, asking how can we set up redirects by country to have country-specific landing pages. This can be done by installing mod_geoip, you can download GeoIP legacy Apache module from GITHUB – compile the source on your environment and configure. Or you could install from a repository.

 For ubuntu you can run the following command:

sudo apt-get install php5-geoip php5-dev libgeoip-dev

Then, run the following command:

sudo pecl install geoip

Once the installation is complete, it will probably tell you that an extension= line cannot be found in your php.ini file. Let’s find your php.ini file and add the required lines:

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

This will open your php.ini, we have to add “extension=geoip.so” to the [PHP] section:

[PHP]
;AFTER THE PHP SECTION NOT BEFORE
extension=geoip.so

and restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Now create a .htaccess file. For example, if you want to block clients from Russia and China:

SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE CN BlockCountry
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE RU BlockCountry
Deny from env=BlockCountry

If you want to redirect based on the country using mod_rewrite in combination with mod_geoip, your .htaccess file could look like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(NL|BE)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/nl/$1 [L]

For more examples take a look at the website of MaxMind

That’s it – don’t forget to comment below.