IP Geolocation allows site owners to capture country codes for their visitors on their origin web server. Learn how to configure the IP Geolocation feature to geolocate your site's traffic.

Overview

Cloudflare can include the country code of the visitor's IP (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) with each request between Cloudflare and the upstream origin web server. This allows site administrators to capture their visitor's IP location in server logging and/or application logic.

The country code value is passed along in the CF-IPCountry request header to the origin web server.

Cloudflare includes country code information for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Currently, the IPv4 information is more robust, but we expect the IPv6 data to improve rapidly.

Configuring IP Geolocation

This feature can be enabled or disabled in the Cloudflare Dashboard through the Network app.

Capturing Geolocation data in server logs

Visitor traffic geolocation information can be captured in origin server logging. Below are two very common web server implementations and how a site administrator could configure custom logging for the IP Geolocation of their visitors.

Apache

LogFormat %{cf-ipcountry}i cloudflare_custom

Nginx

log_format cloudflare_custom '"$http_cf_ipcountry"';

Capturing Geolocation data in application logic

Web applications can also capture and use the IP Geolocation information in their logic. This is useful to direct visitors based on their country or provide defaults such as language and currency. Below are common language examples of how to capture this header into a variable for later use.

PHP

$country_code = $_SERVER["HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"];

Python Flask

country_code = request.headers.get('cf-ipcountry')

NodeJS

const country_code = headers['cf-ipcountry'];

C#.Net

string country_code = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers.Get("cf-ipcountry");

Perl

$country_code = $ENV{"HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"};

Troubleshooting

How to report a wrong IP location?

Cloudflare uses Maxmind as a geolocation database. Cloudflare updates its GeoIP database weekly.

You can use the Maxmind tool and make sure that Maxmind shows the correct Country Code. If the data is incorrect:

• Please submit correction requests through Maxmind here
• Contact Cloudflare Support if Maxmind is showing the correct country code, but CF-IPCountry request header is incorrect

Related resources

• HTTP request headers
• Apache Log Files Format
• Configuring Nginx Logging
• NodeJS Anatomy of an HTTP Transaction