Get user location from the request

[szanuje]

Hey, I have a simple question but I couldn't find an answer. Is there a way to get user location (country) from a GQL request when it reach the server? If not, what could be an alternative way to get user's country which I could pass in the header?

[ardatan]

It depends on the environment you run Yoga in. Yoga is just a middleware. You will find the request objects and so on in the GraphQL Context and you can check the docs how to get the client's information from there. Maybe you can get the ip from a header then use another API to get the location information.

[n1ru4l]

To complete this answer there are multiple ways of achieving this.

For example, you could ask the users for consent of providing you with the location information in the browser and then pass that information along as a header (https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-detect-the-location-of-your-websites-visitor-using-javascript-92f9e91c095f).

Alternatively, you could use the IP of the user for guessing the location with a third-party service. How you retrieve the IP is strongly dependent on your JavaScript runtime environment.
On Node.js you can access it via the context.request.socket.remoteAddress object (https://stackoverflow.com/a/8107922/4202031).
If you are additionally using a load balancer in front of your application you need to instead pass-through the ip as an additional header.

For the vendor-specific solutions, you should ask for those specifically. E.g. for Cloudflare workers the IP can be accessed via a header (https://community.cloudflare.com/t/ip-address-of-the-remote-origin-of-the-request/13080).

[szanuje]

Thank you for your answer. I end up using different approach. My project is build on Vercel and NextJS, so I used it's build in feature for geolocation.
https://vercel.com/changelog/ip-geolocation-for-serverless-functions
I pass the country parameter in the middleware function for each server request, and save it into graphQL context on server creation.