Using the geocoder gem for rails, how do i get the visitor's city?

Question

I can't find documentation to show the visitor's city from ip address? I know how to with HTML5, but I would like to use the value geocoder has. Thanks

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 19 '13 at 20:36

8

It took a couple of hours for me to realize that the answer is pretty simple:

request.location.city

Geocoder page has this example but I thought that I would need to declare request but no, nothing more is needed.

If you don't have Geocoder you have to install the gem but nothing besides that.

answered Dec 19 '13 at 20:36

Claudio Shigueo Watanabe

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when i do this , console shows the empty result . while i'm on the planet earth ;) – Mani Sep 28 '15 at 10:12
When I follow this example, I get a NameError that says "request" is undefined. Why did you not have the same problem? – calyxofheld Aug 14 '16 at 20:46

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 09 '12 at 16:56

6

How I did it was -

location = Geokit::Geocoders::IpGeocoder.geocode(source_ip)
city = location.city
country = location.country

Here, source_ip is a string object.

answered Apr 09 '12 at 16:56

mridula

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 09 '12 at 14:33

1

# app/models/user.rb
geocoded_by :ip_address,
  :latitude => :lat, :longitude => :lon
after_validation :geocode

Snippet from geocoder site.

answered Apr 09 '12 at 14:33

Mikhail Nikalyukin

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I'm actually looking for how it returns the "nearbys" method results for visitors, not users. – kinet Apr 09 '12 at 14:38

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 09 '12 at 15:06

You could do it in 2 different ways

1) If you could get visitors city/ address as a string then geocoder will automatically convert that in to latitude and longitude

class Message < ActiveRecord::Base
  geocoded_by :full_address
  after_validation :geocode

  def full_address
    "#{city}, Sri Lanka"
  end

end

2) Or else you will have to track the ip of the visitor, example is in the home page on the 'geocoder' gem

NOTE: And you could use near by method as follows

<Active Record Object List>.near(<City Name>, <distance>, :order => :distance)

Ex: @messages = @messages.near("colombo", 10, :order => :distance)

and there is a super-duper screen cast by ryan in railscasts

Using the geocoder gem for rails, how do i get the visitor's city?

4 Answers4