Category: Hosting

You will need the geoip-database installed, on RedHat based system with YUM you will use the following:

yum install geoip geoip-devel

So once you have that installed you will need MaxMind’s City database which can be retrieved from MaxMind’s website.

1. wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz -O /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
2. gunzip /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz

So now you have the setup out the way you are ready to configure NGINX, which is relatively straightforward.

The example configuration for your case would go something like the following:

user nginx;
worker_processes auto;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

include /usr/share/nginx/modules/*.conf;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
  geoip_city /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat;

  map $geoip_city_country_code $nearest_server {
    default example.com;
    CA      example.ca;
  }

  server{
      listen 80;
      listen [::]:80;
      server_name example.com
                  example.ca;

      if ($nearest_server != $host) {
        rewrite ^ $scheme://$nearest_server$request_uri break;
      }

  }
}

So, specifics: In the configuration above it does depend on your installation so you’ll need to ensure that the include, error_log and pid directory is correct to your installation and preference.

In respect of how it works, I believe it’s pretty self-explanatory however to delve into it a bit:

geoip_city /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat; > links the downloaded MaxMind GeoIP city data to NGINX.

  map $geoip_city_country_code $nearest_server {
    default example.com;
    CA      example.ca;
  }

The above section links your multiple hosts, and their respective country code, e.g. CA for Canada- you can add as many entries as you want.

  if ($nearest_server != $host) {
    rewrite ^ $scheme://$nearest_server$request_uri break;
  }

The above section decides what server based to use based on location, and passes on the request URI. Example http://example.com/store.php requested from a Canadian IP will redirect to http://example.ca/store.php

That is pretty much it, the main sections are the MAP section, and the IF statement within the server component (and fulfilment of the requirements)