Stellarium crashes 15 seconds after starting up

[Tigran Aivazian]

After the recent upgrade Stellarium crashes every time (even after rm -rf ~/.stellarium) about 15 seconds (plus/minus 0.75 seconds) after starting up with the following error message:

Failure getting IP-based location:
         "Error transferring http://freegeoip.net/json/ - server replied: Forbidden"
[Exoplanets] Starting update...
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what(): illegal value
Aborted

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Release: 18.04

$ apt-cache policy stellarium
stellarium:
  Installed: 0.18.0-1
  Candidate: 0.18.0-1
  Version table:
 *** 0.18.0-1 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Tigran Aivazian (aivazian-tigran)]

I went on irc for help and alexwolf provided the following workaround which fixed the problem:

Open ~/.stellarium/config.ini and change all three instances of http://stellarium... to https://www.stellarium...

After making this change stellarium works absolutely fine. Thank you.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Wilfred F. Drouin Jr. (uncle-bill)]

The user workaround of editing the config.ini file per Tigran Aivazian's comment above worked for me.

[Wilfred F. Drouin Jr. (uncle-bill)]

 . . . and apparently the urls for those JSON files have changed back again. If you used the config.ini edit workaround mentioned above it is broken again. Revert back to the original urls to fix it - again (perhaps just restore config.ini from config.old?)
Looks like any data update call from a bad url writes the html error return into a new "JSON" file, then when the program loads the module and tries to read data from that corrupted JSON file it crashes. Which then triggers another update attempt on the next restart attempt. Next thing you know even your old backup copy of the JSON file is overwritten with the html error.