apilayer/restcountries

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: archived

Adoption not part of the score

2273 stars · 358 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

REST Countries is a Java-based RESTful API that serves information about world countries, including names, ISO codes, currencies, languages, capitals, calling codes, regions, and flags, queryable via endpoints like /name, /alpha, /currency, and /region. It can be self-hosted from this repository, while the hosted version has been commercialized by apilayer as countrylayer.

Use cases

• get country data by iso code in my app
• look up countries by currency or language
• populate a country dropdown with capitals and flags
• self-host a free countries rest api
• filter countries by region or regional bloc
• find a country by its calling code
• fetch country names and translations in

When to choose

• you need free, structured country reference data without licensing hassle
• you want to self-host the API and control availability and rate limits
• your app needs lookups by name, code, currency, language, capital, calling code, or region

When to avoid

• you need frequently updated demographic or economic data rather than static reference data
• you want a managed commercial API with support and SLAs (consider countrylayer)
• you need geocoding or address-level data instead of country-level facts

Facets

service · maturity maintenance

http-server api-framework search-engine apis web-development backend self-hosted jvm self-hosted cross-platform rest-api country-data iso-3166 geolocation -api open-data geospatial web-server

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="apilayer/restcountries")