Guessing user location with Cloudflare Workers

Recently I was building a landing page that needed to display some information relevant to the user’s location.

Using the browser’s Geolocation API is an obvious solution, but who wants to give precise geolocation to a random website on the internet. Also, I believe that the mere fact of such a request will make customers uncomfortable.

Then I found out that Cloudflare has access to the imprecise location of any request going to the Cloudflare worker, and it’s accessible to read.

// this code lives in your cloudflare page worker function
// for example functions/api/location.ts
// which is your example.com/api/location

import type { PagesFunction } from '@cloudflare/workers-types';

export const onRequest: PagesFunction = async (context) => {
  const { latitude, longitude, city, country } = context.request.cf || {};

  const coordinates = {
    latitude,
    longitude,
    city,
    country,
  };

  return new Response(JSON.stringify(coordinates), {
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  });
};

If you are not using Cloudflare Workers, there are services that match IPs with locations.

• Using typescript in page worker functions