Using MaxMind GeoIP2 Databases with HAProxy Enterprise

The MaxMind module for HAProxy Enterprise enables you to perform geolocation lookups from a single point at the edge of your network allowing you to offload this work from your backend servers. This native module integration lets you analyze real-time traffic and assign GeoIP properties to requests as they pass through your HAProxy Enterprise load balancer in order to make decisions on this data. You can package the values up as HTTP request headers before the request is proxied. The integration also allows GeoIP2 databases to be updated quickly and seamlessly without the need for scripts across your application fleet.

HAProxy Enterprise combines HAProxy, the world’s fastest and most widely used, open-source load balancer, with enterprise-class features, services, and premium support. By placing it at the edge of your network, you instantly gain access to improved observability over the load placed upon your servers, whether there is any suspicious client behavior, and how quickly your services are responding to requests.

Adding the GeoIP Module for HAProxy

HAProxy Enterprise provides the MaxMind module via your system’s package manager. Once you’ve added the HAProxy package repositories, you can use apt on Ubuntu or yum on CentOS to install it. Check out the official documentation here (you will need subscriptions to the GeoIP2 databases to make use of the integration).

Within your HAProxy configuration, you choose which GeoIP2 databases to query. For example, the following snippet shows how to load the module and the GeoIP2 City and ISP databases:

1global
2module-path /opt/hapee-1.9/modules
3module-load hapee-lb-maxmind.so
4maxmind-load mlock_max 512000000 CITY /etc/hapee-1.9/GeoIP2-City.mmdb ISP /etc/hapee-1.9/GeoIP2-ISP.mmdb

HAProxy Enterprise makes it easy to keep these databases up to date. Use the maxmind-update directive within the same section in order to fetch a given update URL at a defined interval and replace the contents of the databases. Here’s an example:

1maxmind-update url CITY http://localhost:8000/geoip/GeoIP2-City.mmdb url ISP http://localhost:8000/geoip/GeoIP2-ISP.mmdb

Then, you can inspect incoming IP addresses and look up their associated cities and countries. Use the http-request add-header directive to add a custom HTTP request header before the message is forwarded to your backend servers. Here’s an example:

1listen www_proxy
2bind :80
3mode http
4http-request add-header X-Country %[src,maxmind-lookup("CITY","country","iso_code")]
5server s1 127.0.0.1:8080

The resulting request header will look like this: X-Country: US.

Conclusion

In the guide, you learned about the integration between MaxMind’s GeoIP2 databases and HAProxy Enterprise. You can use this to gain better insights about your clients so that you can customize your site’s content depending on their location. Tailoring content based on geolocation data is a great way to optimize advertisements, marketing copy, local events, and more. Being able to offload this task to HAProxy makes it easy.