Finding where that IP address is from with iploc

Today I spent some time building iploc, a small CLI utility that lets you retrieve geographical information of an IP address.

First and foremost, I’d like to clarify that this library is nothing but a CLI wrapper for the ip-api.com, which does the actual heavy-lifting for us.

Long story short, iploc is a very small utility that let’s you lookup geographical information of an IP address directly from the CLI — you simply give it the address you want to “reverse geocode” and it will print out a bunch of information:

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iploc 12.34.56.78
{"as":"AS7018 AT\u0026T Services, Inc.","city":"Columbus","country":"United States","countryCode":"US","isp":"AT\u0026T Services","lat":39.9653,"lon":-83.0235,"org":"AT\u0026T Services","query":"12.34.56.78","region":"OH","regionName":"Ohio","status":"success","timezone":"America/New_York","zip":"43215"}

Indulging my passion for gluttony, I’ve added a pretty-print option for humans:

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iploc 12.34.56.78 -p
{
    "as": "AS7018 AT\u0026T Services, Inc.",
    "city": "Columbus",
    "country": "United States",
    "countryCode": "US",
    "isp": "AT\u0026T Services",
    "lat": 39.9653,
    "lon": -83.0235,
    "org": "AT\u0026T Services",
    "query": "12.34.56.78",
    "region": "OH",
    "regionName": "Ohio",
    "status": "success",
    "timezone": "America/New_York",
    "zip": "43215"
}

but you’d really be better off with tools such as jq:

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iploc 12.34.56.78 | jq -r .city
Columbus

Installing iploc is fairly straightforward, as you can simply grab the right binary from the release page on GitHub:

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/tmp ᐅ wget https://github.com/odino/iploc/releases/download/v1.0.0/iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz
--2018-07-07 16:35:12--  https://github.com/odino/iploc/releases/download/v1.0.0/iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz
Resolving github.com (github.com)... 192.30.253.113, 192.30.253.112
Connecting to github.com (github.com)|192.30.253.113|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/140064185/ae86980c-81dd-11e8-86f7-510d153790f8?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20180707%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20180707T123513Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=32b345f28416ae597379622a361e9f01347cfac31984125353ba4801d147473e&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=0&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Diploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream [following]
--2018-07-07 16:35:13--  https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/140064185/ae86980c-81dd-11e8-86f7-510d153790f8?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20180707%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20180707T123513Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=32b345f28416ae597379622a361e9f01347cfac31984125353ba4801d147473e&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=0&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Diploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream
Resolving github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com (github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com)... 52.216.96.227
Connecting to github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com (github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com)|52.216.96.227|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2977802 (2.8M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz.1’

iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz.1                     100%[======================================================================================================================>]   2.84M   362KB/s    in 10s     

2018-07-07 16:35:24 (287 KB/s) - ‘iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz.1’ saved [2977802/2977802]

/tmp ᐅ tar -xzf iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0.tar.gz                                                    
/tmp ᐅ ./iploc_linux_amd64_v1.0.0 12.34.56.78
{"as":"AS7018 AT\u0026T Services, Inc.","city":"Columbus","country":"United States","countryCode":"US","isp":"AT\u0026T Services","lat":39.9653,"lon":-83.0235,"org":"AT\u0026T Services","query":"12.34.56.78","region":"OH","regionName":"Ohio","status":"success","timezone":"America/New_York","zip":"43215"}

…that’s it: there’s nothing else the tool does (rightfully, I would say).

As opposed to last time, today I opted to use cobra as I wanted to see what overhead it would introduce in a tool this small: from my perspective, setting up the CLI app with cobra was fairly quick and straightforward, even though the binaries are a bit chubbier (the amd64 linux binary is 2.8mb vs 2.5mb, so nothing crazy to be honest). Definitely recommended.

That’s it for today!

In the mood for some more reading?

...or check the archives.