Get User's Location, Country and Currency in Django

I once had to create a location-based ecommerce application with Django Web Framework as the backend. While building the project, I needed a way to display products’ prices and currency based on the current user’s location. I made some research, got it working, then finally integrated it into the project.

This article shows you how to display currency symbol based on the user’s current location (country).

In this article, the following Frameworks and libraries will be used:

• Django

• GeoIP2

Let’s Get Right Into It

Install a virtual Environment.

It is part of development best practices to create your project in a virtual environment. Use venv to install and activate a virtual environment named env:

python -m venv env

source env/bin/activate # Linux/MacOS
env\Scripts\activate.bat # Windows

Install Django and GeoIP

pip install Django
pip install geoip2

Create Django Project

django-admin startproject geolocation

Create Django App

python manage.py startapp currency

Install App

Open settings.py file and add the currency app to the list of installed app:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'currency',
]

Start Development Server

python manage.py runserver

Our development server is now running.

Get User’s Country

Open the views.py file located in the currency app and add the following code:

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.contrib.gis.geoip2 import GeoIP2

def currency(request):
    g = GeoIP2()
    remote_addr = request.META.get('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR')
    if remote_addr:
        address = remote_addr.split(',')[-1].strip()
    else:
        address = request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR')
    country = g.country_code(address)

In the code above, I got the user’s IP address from the request object. The IP address is located in either HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR or REMOTE_ADDR in the request object

I then passed in the IP address  - as a parameter  - into GeoIP2’s country_code method to get the user’s country.

Get the Country’s Currency

To get the currency of the country in which the user is, we will make use of a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) file which contains a list of countries, their country code, currency, currency symbol and other information.

This JSON file can be gotten here. You can either download the JSON file and add it to your project or use the link.

Let’s take a look at the structure of this JSON file:

[
    {
        "id": 154,
        "name": "Nigeria",
        "isoAlpha2": "NG",
        "isoAlpha3": "NGA",
        "isoNumeric": 566,
        "currency": {
        "code": "NGN",
        "name": "Naira",
        "symbol": "₦"
    },
]

Let’s parse this JSON file and extract the information we need from it.

Update your views.py file with the following:

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.contrib.gis.geoip2 import GeoIP2
import json

def currency(request):
    g = GeoIP2()
    remote_addr = request.META.get('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR')
    if remote_addr:
        address = remote_addr.split(',')[-1].strip()
    else:
        address = request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR')
    country = g.country_code(address)

    with open('static/json/currency.json', encoding="utf8") as f:
        data = json.load(f)
        for keyval in data:
            if country == keyval['isoAlpha2']:
                code = keyval['currency']['code']
                symbol = keyval['currency']['symbol']
    return [code, symbol]

In this function, I:

• Open the JSON file.

• Loop through the dictionaries in the list.

• Search for any isoAlpha2 key with the country variable as its value

• Get the currency key of the dictionary

• Return the currency values  - code and symbol -  in a list

With that out of the way, we can now create a view that makes use of this function.

In views.py, add the following view:

from django.http import HttpResponse
...

def index(request):
    currency= {
        "currency_code": currency()[0],
        "currency_symbol": currency()[1]
    }
    return HttpResponse(currency)

Add URL Routes

Create a urls.py file in your app directory and add the following URL patterns:

from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.index, name='search'),
]

Update your project urls.py file:

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    path('', include('currency.urls')),
]

Now, open your web browser and go to https://127.0.0.1:8000 to see your current country's currency and symbol.

Alternatives

Another alternative that we can use to get a user’s location is with HTML Geolocation API. This is a more accurate method of determining a user's coordinates.

Note that the users have to give you permission to access the location coordinates.

CONCLUSION

In this article, we covered how to get a user’s location and country currency using Django. We also looked at how to parse and extract data from a JSON file.

Thanks for reading.

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