[MacOS] geoip aka libgeoip disabled on 2024-12-12

[Felipe Villegas]

While following the GeoDjango installation instructions for MacOS, I encountered the following error regarding libgeoip, an alternative name for geoip per the Homebrew Formulae page.

$ brew install libgeoip
Error: geoip has been disabled because it has an archived upstream repository! It was disabled on 2024-12-12.

Django Project Docs:
​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/contrib/gis/install/#homebrew

Django Source:
​https://github.com/django/django/blob/922c1c732a47c02aa5ef28b0b1a2bd9bc9b92d87/docs/ref/contrib/gis/install/index.txt#L272C6-L272C28

Related Blog Post:
​https://blog.maxmind.com/2020/06/retirement-of-geoip-legacy-downloadable-databases-in-may-2022/

[Jan Tumpa]

What exactly are we trying to accomplish here, a change in the documentation or something else?

From my testing, the library can still be normally installed with MacPorts, so maybe that should be the recommended way?

Additionally, you _can_ install it using HomeBrew by using the --force flag, but AFAIK that installs it ignoring any exceptions that come up, which might not be the best thing to recommend.

Finally, perhaps installing from source could be the recommended way?

Even with all that, the repository is archived, so I'm not sure how to move forward with this issue?

[Jon Culver]

Best I can tell, ​geoip (aliased as libgeoip) just referred to ​a C extension, which read the now-deprecated .dat database format, but that repo was archived in June 2022, when MaxMind retired the legacy databases. For modern use with MaxMind's newer .mmdb file format, the relevant library is ​libmaxminddb, which ​can be installed via Homebrew. However:

1. It's just an optional performance optimization. The geoip2 Python package ​falls back to a pure Python implementation if the C library isn't found;
2. geoip2 ​depends on the Python package maxminddb; which, most importantly:
3. libmaxminddb is compiled on install of maxminddb unless you intentionally opt out. See ​setup.py.

TL/DR: A documentation change looks to be the right call here, just so folks don't run into that error. Removing brew install libgeoip seems the most pragmatic, since it's already included.

I had to type this out to keep all my thinking in order :) additional reads or clarifications certainly welcome.

[GitHub <noreply@…>]

In 6c2436f:

Fixed #36272 -- Removed obsolete libgeoip from GeoDjango installation docs.

[Jacob Walls <jacobtylerwalls@…>]

In 7bc9d39f:

[6.0.x] Fixed #36272 -- Removed obsolete libgeoip from GeoDjango installation docs.

Backport of 6c2436fa8671cd41c6a5841493142308cd9541c8 from main.