Get the public IP of user's computer

Thu 11 December 2014

Filed under Python

Here's how to get the IP

For a recent project, I needed to get the longitude and latitude of where the user was at the time. And from that data, I could get the local weather.

To do that, I'd find her local IP and then later use pygeoip.GeoIP to find the coordinates of that IP. (That's another post)

First, I used:

ip = request.remote_addr

request.remote_addr: request is part of the Flask module that i was using to create this web application. In very short, the request 'remembers' the value of what we were requesting. Check out the request class of Flask.

Then a fellow HackerSchooler pointed out that sometimes that might get my local host (127.0.0.1) and not the IP as I thought I might get.

The suggestion was:

• First attempt to get the IP that way, since it is more 'resources efficient'.
• Also have an if statement to check if it did indeed get me that local host.
• And if it is the localhost, then use icanhazip.com to get the IP.

So here is the code:

import requests  #import the request module

def get_ip():
    ip = request.remote_addr
    if ip == '127.0.0.1':
        ip = requests.get("http://icanhazip.com/").content
    return ip

requests.get: the ip is the response. It is the content from the get request to "http://icanhazip.com/".

Read more about the different attributes for requests.get(some_url).attributes http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/#make-a-request

---MORE ABOUT REQUESTS---

requests is a more reliable library than the old urllib2
http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/