Get the longitude and latitude as user's machine in PHP [duplicate]

Answer 1

The only way to geolocate on the serverside would be to use a lookup table for the IP adress. There are services that provide this for you, so you could do this :

$ip  = !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$url = "http://freegeoip.net/json/$ip";
$ch  = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if ($data) {
    $location = json_decode($data);

    $lat = $location->latitude;
    $lon = $location->longitude;

    $sun_info = date_sun_info(time(), $lat, $lon);
    print_r($sun_info);
}

It won't always be very accurate though. In javascript you would have access to the HTML5 Geolocation API, or Google Maps, but reverse geocoding with Google requires you to use a map, as per the TOS.

NOTE (2019): The service used in the example, FreeGeoIP has shut down, I'll leave the answer for posterity, as there are surely other services offering the same service.

Answer 2

Because exact location requires user consent, it cannot be done with PHP. Try using JS to get the user's location and use AJAX to send it to the server.

If you are willing to use an approximate location, you can map by IP address. A web search will bring up a few options for that, such as this one.

Answer 3

Please refer to the Google Maps API Geocoder: http://lab.abhinayrathore.com/ipmapper/

That will answer all of your questions from A-Z. If you are having trouble putting it to use check out where this question has been asked and answered: Find Latitude & Longitude of a given IP Address using IPMapper

This will be done using Javascript and not PHP