Question

I’m stuck trying to get an API call to Google Places working. I’m using a server-side PHP proxy for the request – not because I want to, but because it’s part of JQuery-POI-Mapper.

The server I’m using is an Amazon EC2 server without a static IP address. I’m out of stactic IP addresses at the moment, but I’ll take the time to request more if people think that’s the problem. I identified the current public IP address of my EC2 server by running this command on the server:

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4

Next, I went to https://code.google.com/apis/console and created a new API key. I selected a server-side API key and used my EC2 server’s public IP address.

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Under the services tab, I enabled every related API I could think of, including:

• Google Maps API v2
• Google Maps API v3
• Google Maps Gelolocation API
• Places API
• Static Maps API

Here’s a screen capture of my Services:

The proxy code running on the EC2 server is part of a commercial package, so I shouldn’t post the entire code, but it’s very short, and the important part is:

$json = file_get_contents($url);

The $url variable in my case was:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=-37.7133771,145.14891620000003&radius=2000&types=bakery&sensor=false&key=AIzaSyCCUV...

The response I get is:

{
   "html_attributions" : [],
   "results" : [],
   "status" : "REQUEST_DENIED"
}

I checked to see if I had gone over my quota already, but everything looks OK. What’s interesting is that Google is showing that I had made requests to the Places API today, so Google definitely knows that the requests are coming from me.

Here’s a screen capture of my API Traffic Report, which is all from testing:

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Bret

Answer 1

You need a Static IP address to successfully use IP Locking with a Server API Key.