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/$1 [L]
For more example take a look at the website of MaxMind
That’s it – don’t forget to comment below.
10 comments On How to configure .htaccess redirects based on Geo IP
Hi Torbjorn, excellent info.
I tried the following, using your example (masking my domain name for privacy reasons):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(NL|BE)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://mydomain.com/shop/nl/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(DE)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://mydomain.com/shop/de/$1 [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
Unfortunately, this gives me an http:500 error. I am probably making a very stupid error somehow, wondering if you could help?
Kind regards, Tristan
Do you have the rewrite engine enabled in Apache?
Hi,
I have followed your article to setup geoip, but i’m using PHP 7.2.7
This is my code, i have enabled geoip with wordpress, following is my .htaccess code
I want to redirect my home page for india to https://hostguns.com/in
For global sit : https://hostguns.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^(IN)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://hostguns.com/in/$1 [L]
But i this configuration didn’t work well.
I have tested the htaccess, it is working fine.
All countries show only https://hostguns.com.
Can you help me in this ?
Thanks in advance.
Sorry, been away. Have you been able to resolve.
Hi Torbjorn, Nice article. Do you have an article for IP2Location LITE database? It has database with ZIP code and we would like to block by ZIP codes.
Johan,
No, I don’t have an article on IP2Location LITE database, we have not been able to test how you could block by IP codes. Maybe in your testing, you would like to contribute and article on IP2Location LITE database.
Torbjorn
How can i redirect a single wordpress page based on his/her location?
What do you mean with his/her location?
Hi
1-What if we hit the 1000 limit per day?
Can this solution scale on some paid account? Please point.
2-What we’re looking for is for those checks to occur ONLY if the user calls the top domain without language sub domain. Any tip?
Thanks
When you hit a limit there will be a cost associated with it, it can scale.
I would look into Cloudflare – I use Cloudflare in front of my website – there are addons to Cloudflare to do redirects or you can if you have the in-house skills do it with custom workers in javascript in Cloudflare. https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/geo-redirect