The GeoIP feature for Cloud Platform Enterprise and Site Factory uses the MaxMind GeoLite2 City Database to identify the country of origin of HTTP requests, based on the request’s IP address. The GeoIP feature obtains the IP address from the X-Forwarded-For header, or the client IP address if there is no X-Forwarded-For header. The Cloud Platform infrastructure adds the two-letter country code (ISO-3166–1 alpha-2) in the X-Geo-Country header of the HTTP request. If the MaxMind GeoLite2 City Database can’t identify the country from the request IP address, it sets the country code to AA. Your website’s back-end code can then use the country code in the header to set your visitor’s country.

The GeoIP feature supports the MaxMind IPv4 and IPv6 country database.

The GeoIP feature doesn’t support region- or city-level IP targeting. Targeting at these levels requires custom development, which is available from Acquia as a Professional Services engagement. For a different approach to geographical targeting, see Personalization, which supports targeting specific content on your website based not only on geography, but on additional criteria.

For a client-side application, instead of a Cloud Platform-based solution, see the MaxMind GeoIP2 JavaScript Client API. For more information, contact MaxMind.

Enabling the GeoIP feature

To enable the GeoIP feature, create a Support ticket to request Acquia enable the GeoIP feature for your Cloud Platform Enterprise or Site Factory application. Acquia Support will enable the GeoIP feature for each of your application’s environments by including a addon-geoip.vcl in your application’s Varnish® runtime. Updating your Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) file requires restarting Varnish on your dedicated load balancers and clears the Varnish cache, which can result in reduced performance while the cache is rebuilt.

Using GeoIP information