Introduction to IPAPI

IPAPI is a public API that provides geolocation data based on IP addresses. With just an IP address, you can retrieve information like the country, city, and latitude/longitude coordinates of a user, making it a valuable tool for location-based services.

In this blog post, we will explore how to use IPAPI's API to retrieve geolocation data in JavaScript.

Getting Started

To get started, we first need to sign up for an API key on https://ipapi.co/. Once you have your API key, you can begin making requests to the API.

Here's an example JavaScript code snippet to make a request to the API using fetch():

const ipapiBaseUrl = 'https://ipapi.co/';
const apiKey = 'ENTER_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE';

const ipAddress = '8.8.8.8'; // Replace with the IP address you wish to look up

fetch(`${ipapiBaseUrl}${ipAddress}/json/?key=${apiKey}`)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(json => {
    console.log(json);
    // Do something with the JSON response
  })
  .catch(error => console.error(error));

In the example above, we're making a request for the geolocation data for IP address 8.8.8.8. After calling response.json(), the result is a JSON object that contains the geolocation data for the IP address.

Example API Requests

Here are some additional examples of API requests you can make with IPAPI using JavaScript:

// Retrieve geolocation data for the current user's IP address
fetch(`${ipapiBaseUrl}json/?key=${apiKey}`)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(json => console.log(json))
  .catch(error => console.error(error));

// Retrieve geolocation data for an IP address using a POST request
const ipToLookUp = '8.8.8.8';
const postData = new FormData();
postData.append('ip', ipToLookUp);

fetch(`${ipapiBaseUrl}batch/`, {
  method: 'POST',
  body: postData
})
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(json => console.log(json))
  .catch(error => console.error(error));

Conclusion

In this blog post, we've explored how to use IPAPI's API to retrieve geolocation data in JavaScript. With just a few lines of code, you can quickly fetch data like the country, city, and latitude/longitude coordinates of an IP address.