JohnAllen.us

Sometimes its nice to be able to  find out what IP address you are using to get to the Internet for things like setting up servers on the correct interface.  I use the following code to find this out:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'open-uri'

def myINETaddr
  ip1 = open("http://ip.dnsexit.com/").read[1..20]
  ip2 = open("http://checkip.dyndns.org:8245/").read[/IP Address\: (.*)\<\/body/, 1]
  if ip1 != ip2
    throw "myINETaddr::UnableToRetrieve"
  end
  return ip1
end

if __FILE__ == $0
  puts myINETaddr
end

I have it check two outside services just to make sure they both agree…otherwise I have it throw an error. Of course, if you are behind a proxy server or NAT device, this method is just going to return the IP address of that device. If you just want the IP address of your default network interface, this code does the job just fine:

require 'socket'

def myIPaddr
   IPSocket.getaddress(Socket.gethostname)
end

if __FILE__ == $0
   puts myIPaddr
end