The libmaxminddb library provides a C library for reading MaxMind DB files, including the GeoIP2 databases from MaxMind. This is a custom binary format designed to facilitate fast lookups of IP addresses while allowing for great flexibility in the type of data associated with an address.

The MaxMind DB format is an open format. The spec is available at https://maxmind.github.io/MaxMind-DB/. This spec is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

See https://dev.maxmind.com/ for more details about MaxMind's GeoIP2 products.

This library is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.

NOTE: These instructions are for installation from the named .tar.gz tarballs on the Releases page (e.g. libmaxminddb-*.tar.gz).

This code is known to work with GCC 4.4+ and clang 3.2+. It should also work on other compilers that supports C99, POSIX.1-2001, and the -fms-extensions flag (or equivalent). The latter is needed to allow an anonymous union in a structure.

To install this code, run the following commands:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig

You can skip the make check step but it's always good to know that tests are passing on your platform.

The configure script takes the standard options to set where files are installed such as --prefix, etc. See ./configure --help for details.

If after installing, you receive an error that libmaxminddb.so.0 is missing you may need to add the lib directory in your prefix to your library path. On most Linux distributions when using the default prefix (/usr/local), you can do this by running the following commands:

$ sudo sh -c "echo /usr/local/lib  >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf"
$ ldconfig

NOTE: These instructions are for installation from the GitHub "Source Code" archives also available on the Releases page (e.g. X.Y.Z.zip or X.Y.Z.tar.gz), as well as installation directly from a clone of the Git repo. Installation from these sources are possible but will present challenges to users not comfortable with manual dependency resolution.

You will need automake, autoconf, and libtool installed in addition to make and a compiler.

You can clone this repository and build it by running:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/maxmind/libmaxminddb

After cloning, run ./bootstrap from the libmaxminddb directory and then follow the instructions for installing from a named release tarball as described above.

We provide a CMake build script. This is primarily targeted at Windows users, but it can be used in other circumstances where the Autotools script does not work.

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ cmake --build .
$ ctest -V .
$ cmake --build . --target install

When building with Visual Studio, you may build a multithreaded (MT/MTd) runtime library, using the MSVC_STATIC_RUNTIME setting:

$ cmake -DMSVC_STATIC_RUNTIME=ON -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF ..

MaxMind provides a PPA for recent version of Ubuntu. To add the PPA to your APT sources, run:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maxmind/ppa

Then install the packages by running:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install libmaxminddb0 libmaxminddb-dev mmdb-bin

You can install libmaxminddb on macOS using Homebrew:

$ brew install libmaxminddb

Or with MacPorts:

$ sudo port install libmaxminddb

libmaxminddb requires a minimum of POSIX.1-2001 support. If not specified at compilation time, it defaults to requesting POSIX.1-2008 support.

Please report bugs by filing an issue with our GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/maxmind/libmaxminddb/issues

Use make safedist to check the resulting tarball.

Copyright 2013-2024 MaxMind, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.