Doing a GeoIP lookup and setting custom routing

There might be times when our app needs to give people different pages depending on which country they're in. Using Laravel and MaxMind's GeoIP data, we can lookup a person's country, based on their IP address, and then redirect them to the page we need.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll just need a working Laravel 4 installation.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

1. Open the composer.json file and update the require section, so it looks like the following snippet:

   "require": {
     "laravel/framework": "4.0.*",
     "geoip/geoip": "dev-master"
   },

2. In the command line window, run the composer update with the following command:

     php composer.phar update
   

3. Go to http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/geolite/ and download the latest GeoLite Country database. Unzip it and put the GeoIP.dat file in the root of our app.

4. In the app/config directory, create a file named geoip.php with the following code:

   <?php
   
   return array(
     'path' =&gt...