Ruby Geolocation Gem/Plugins

Your current best bet is probably GeoKit (http://github.com/andre/geokit-gem for gem, http://github.com/andre/geokit-rails for plugin). It has built in functionality for Yahoo and Google API keys, distance calculation helpers, reverse geolocation, etc.

However, GeoMereLaal (http://github.com/parolkar/geo_mere_laal/) is based on the working draft of the W3C Geolocaton API. It's very limited at the moment as I could only get it to work in Firefox, but it will be more accurate as it's supported by more browsers since it uses more methods of Geolocation (GPS, WiFi, cookies, IP).

How to find where gem files are installed

Use gem environment to find out about your gem environment:

RubyGems Environment:
  - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 2.1.5
  - RUBY VERSION: 2.0.0 (2013-06-27 patchlevel 247) [x86_64-darwin12.4.0]
  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Users/ttm/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0
  - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /Users/ttm/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/bin/ruby
  - EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /Users/ttm/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/bin
  - SPEC CACHE DIRECTORY: /Users/ttm/.gem/specs
  - RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
    - ruby
    - x86_64-darwin-12
  - GEM PATHS:
     - /Users/ttm/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0
     - /Users/ttm/.gem/ruby/2.0.0
  - GEM CONFIGURATION:
     - :update_sources => true
     - :verbose => true
     - :backtrace => false
     - :bulk_threshold => 1000
  - REMOTE SOURCES:
     - https://rubygems.org/
  - SHELL PATH:
     - /Users/ttm/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/bin
     - /Users/ttm/.rbenv/libexec
     - /Users/ttm/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin
     - /Users/ttm/perl5/perlbrew/bin
     - /Users/ttm/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.18.1/bin
     - /Users/ttm/.pyenv/shims
     - /Users/ttm/.pyenv/bin
     - /Users/ttm/.rbenv/shims
     - /Users/ttm/.rbenv/bin
     - /Users/ttm/bin
     - /usr/local/mysql-5.6.12-osx10.7-x86_64/bin
     - /Users/ttm/libsmi/bin
     - /usr/local/bin
     - /usr/bin
     - /bin
     - /usr/sbin
     - /sbin
     - /usr/local/bin

Notice the two sections for:

INSTALLATION DIRECTORY
GEM PATHS

Ruby on rails gem for google map integration

I've used the YM4R, Georuby and spatial adapter gems with good results before.
see this description.

Getting a user country name from originating IP address with Ruby on Rails

You can use geoip gem.

environment.rb

config.gem 'geoip'

Download GeoIP.dat.gz from http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry. unzip the file. The below assumes under #{RAILS_ROOT}/db dir.

@geoip ||= GeoIP.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/db/GeoIP.dat")    
remote_ip = request.remote_ip 
if remote_ip != "127.0.0.1" #todo: check for other local addresses or set default value
  location_location = @geoip.country(remote_ip)
  if location_location != nil     
    @model.country = location_location[2]
  end
end

Search by location using an array with geokit gem

You can chain multiple calls like:

model = Model.in_range("0".."5",:origin => [Lat1, Lng1]).in_range("0".."5",:origin => [Lat2, Lng2])

For deep reference, check the method at https://github.com/geokit/geokit-rails/blob/3a7b4e1083dd06d486307ebf71c36608186c8d73/lib/geokit-rails/acts_as_mappable.rb#L134

How do you get a ruby gem into the include path for require

It's actually not to hard to do this manually. Let's say you have a library whatever.rb that you want to distribute as a gem.

make a directory lib and put a copy of whatever.rb in lib/whatever.rb.

make a file whatever.gemspec, and put the following in there, filling in the appropriate values:


 Gem::Specification.new do |spec|
   spec.name = 'the-name-of-your-gem'
   spec.version ='0.0.1'

   # this is important - it specifies which files to include in the gem.
   spec.files = ["lib/whatever.rb"]

   # optional, but useful to your users
   spec.summary = "A more longwinded description of your gem"
   spec.author = 'Your Name'
   spec.email = 'you@yourdomain.com'
   spec.homepage = 'http://www.yourpage.com'

   # you did document with RDoc, right?
   spec.has_rdoc = true

   # if you have a ruby forge project
   spec.rubyforge_project = 'your-project-name-on-rubyforge'

   # if you have any dependencies on other gems, list them thusly
   spec.add_dependency('hpricot')
   spec.add_dependency('log4r', '>= 1.0.5')
 end

now, to build the gem, use the gem build command:


% gem build whatever.gemspec
Successfully built RubyGem
Name: the-name-of-your-gem
Version: 0.0.1
File: the-name-of-your-gem-0.0.1.gem
%

You can test locally by using gem install the-name-of-your-gem-0.0.1.gem
To use your library in a script then, simply do the following at the top:
```
require 'rubygems' # puts gem libraries in the require path
require 'whatever' # loads your library
```

For more on what the various settings in the gemspec file, check the GemSpec Reference.

Personally, I use rubygems a lot to package executable scripts as well, and find it very handy for that.

Create and store the geo-location data

I would reccomend PostGIS and then use a Ruby Connector.

Rails 3.2.3 GeoLocation Using MaxMind

Did you try https://github.com/imajes/geokit-gem?

How to store and find records based on location?

It should be easy to find the math to solve that, providing lat/long coordinates.

Or you could use some full featured gem to do that for you like Geocoder, that supports Mongoid or MongoMapper.

Next time you need some feature that might be a commun world problem, first check if there is a gem for that at ruby-toolbox, for this case here are some other gems for geocoding

Ruby Geolocation Gem/Plugins