Updated: 3 November 2026 · Applies to: ipinfo.io's public geolocation API
To find a Linux server's geographic location from the terminal, query a free IP geolocation API with curl. ipinfo.io returns your server's public IP address plus its city, region and country in a single request, so no second lookup is needed.
Install curl and jq
curl makes the API request, and jq reads the specific fields out of its JSON reply.
On Debian or Ubuntu:
apt install -y curl jq
On AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux or RHEL:
dnf install -y curl jq
Find the server's public IP address
Run:
curl https://ipinfo.io/ip
This prints just the IP address, nothing else.
Get the city, region and country
Request the full record instead, which includes location data along with the IP address:
curl https://ipinfo.io/json
This returns the server's IP address, hostname, city, region, country code, coordinates, network and time zone as JSON. To pull out just the location fields with jq:
curl -s https://ipinfo.io/json | jq -r '"City: " + .city, "Region: " + .region, "Country: " + .country, "Coordinates: " + .loc'
The coordinates field is a single string of latitude and longitude separated by a comma.
Save it as a script
To avoid typing the full command every time, save it as a small script. Create the file:
vim getipgeoloc.sh
Paste in the following line:
curl -s https://ipinfo.io/json | jq -r '"City: " + .city, "Region: " + .region, "Country: " + .country, "Coordinates: " + .loc'
Save the file, then make it executable:
chmod +x getipgeoloc.sh
Run it whenever you need the server's location:
./getipgeoloc.sh
A note on rate limits
ipinfo.io answers a reasonable number of requests a day without any signup. If you need to run this check often, for example from a monitoring script on several servers, create a free account on ipinfo.io and add a token to the request, which raises the daily limit.
