I know you can do ifconfig | grep inet
, but that shows you several IPv4 addresses. How do I get the specific one for SSHing et al?
-
What you are looking for is not your Mac IP address but the public IP address your ISP attributed to the Internet interface of your router.– danFeb 12, 2019 at 11:26
-
Need to change title for public IP address.– alturiumJun 18, 2020 at 17:29
-
3This worked for me : > curl ipecho.net/plain; echo– alturiumJun 18, 2020 at 17:37
-
2You should either clarify your question, i.e. you want to know internal IP in your local network or change the accepted answer, because none of the answers give you an option to get an external IP, but a few comments do.– ruslanivDec 4, 2020 at 7:15
-
@alturium you should make it an answer, because it IS the answer to the question. Just add a command to get internal IP as well.– ruslanivDec 4, 2020 at 7:16
9 Answers
Use ipconfig getifaddr en1
for wireless, or ipconfig getifaddr en0
for ethernet.
ipconfig getifaddr en0
is default for the Wi-Fi network adapter.
Alternatively you can also do:
dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com
Output, e.g.:
172.79.136.120
-
20This shows my internal (to my router) IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.xxx), not the external IP address. (As do most of the other answers below.) May 5, 2015 at 22:38
-
4
-
6
-
12echo External IP:
curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'
– grigbAug 16, 2016 at 17:51 -
45It has changed for years, 'ipconfig getifaddr en0' is default for wifi interface Jan 31, 2017 at 16:35
The following works for me on 10.8 and on 10.10 Yosemite.
ifconfig | grep "inet " | grep -Fv 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
If you find the above gives you more than one answer, save the following to a script, and run it instead
ip_address.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
dumpIpForInterface()
{
IT=$(ifconfig "$1")
if [[ "$IT" != *"status: active"* ]]; then
return
fi
if [[ "$IT" != *" broadcast "* ]]; then
return
fi
echo "$IT" | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
}
main()
{
# snagged from here: https://superuser.com/a/627581/38941
DEFAULT_ROUTE=$(route -n get 0.0.0.0 2>/dev/null | awk '/interface: / {print $2}')
if [ -n "$DEFAULT_ROUTE" ]; then
dumpIpForInterface "$DEFAULT_ROUTE"
else
for i in $(ifconfig -s | awk '{print $1}' | awk '{if(NR>1)print}')
do
if [[ $i != *"vboxnet"* ]]; then
dumpIpForInterface "$i"
fi
done
fi
}
main
-
7The should be the accepted answer in my opinion since it doesn't require any wired vs. wireless specification. Jun 13, 2017 at 15:14
-
-
-
1Can confirm this solution works great. I have multiple interfaces all with valid local IPs, but this solution properly returns the IP for the primary interface (that is, the interface used to route traffic to the wider net)– ChrisOct 19, 2020 at 21:20
-
1
Just type curl ifconfig.me
in the terminal.
-
1Your answer fails if his "ssh" interface has an RFC 1918 private address. Oct 20, 2021 at 6:42
-
I've got this set up in an .aliases dotfile for frequent ip lookup:
alias ip="dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com"
alias localip="ipconfig getifaddr en0"
-
For me, the localip option there doesn't work anymore, but this does:
ifconfig | grep "inet " | grep -Fv 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
– BarryFeb 10, 2021 at 17:51 -
This is the best answer: While
dig
does reach outside of your machine, it is a domain name resolver, which means its main function is precisely to match domain name to IP address. In this case, it is your own IP address, of course. Mar 8, 2021 at 16:58 -
the ip alias doesn't seem to be working (I'm on OSX Catalina). This one does:
curl -s http://ipecho.net/plain; echo
– JKLJul 12, 2021 at 14:45
You can do the following:
Type ifconfig
or ifconfig -a
. This command shows you the list of interfaces along with their IP and MAC addresses (the latter one only if applicable). You can also type ifconfig en0
or ifconfig en1
for the configuration of a particular interface only (as someone said in their answers, en0 is typically the wired Ethernet while en1 is the WiFi interface).
As an alternative, netstat -i
will list all interfaces and will show you the IP addresses you have assigned to each of them.
Typically, when you have SSH daemon running on a box, it will listen on all available interfaces, ie. you can use any IP address that's configured on your machine to connect to that machine via SSH (this, obviously, subject to Firewall rules). If you're after what the OS calls a Primary interface and primary IP address, you can use the scutil
command like this:
MacBook:~ scutil
> show State:/Network/Global/IPv4
<dictionary> {
PrimaryInterface : en0
PrimaryService : C0550F84-5C07-484F-8D62-C8B90DC977D8
Router : 10.103.4.1
}
> show State:/Network/Interface/en0/IPv4
<dictionary> {
Addresses : <array> {
0 : 10.103.4.234
}
BroadcastAddresses : <array> {
0 : 10.103.4.255
}
SubnetMasks : <array> {
0 : 255.255.255.0
}
}
Please note, that the above, even though is a command-line command, is also interactive (so you run scutil
and then enter its own commands into it). The first show
command tells you the name of the primary interface for the OS (i.e. this will be the one on top of the list in your System Preferences / Network Preferences window), as well as the IP address of your default router. The second show
command takes State:/Network/Interface/<ifname>/IPv4
argument (in this case, en0
) and gives you the IP addresses assigned to it. You're looking for the address in the Addresses array, the other two entries are broadcast addresses and the netmasks.
Hope that helps, but if anything is not clear, let me know.
-
3Thanks for this answer. I wrote a quick script to get the IP your primary interface:
echo "show State:/Network/Interface/$(echo 'show State:/Network/Global/IPv4' | scutil | grep 'PrimaryInterface ' | sed 's/ PrimaryInterface : //')/IPv4" | scutil | pcregrep -Mo1 " Addresses : <array> {\n 0 : ([0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3})"
– HellaMadJan 14, 2015 at 19:09
To find your Mac's current internal IP address, run:
ifconfig -l | xargs -n1 ipconfig getifaddr
This is basically equivalent to ipconfig getifaddr en0
, but more reliable! en0
is not always the current network interface!
Thank you to @epylinkn in the comments of another answer for this hint. I'm posting it here so it's more visible; I initially missed it myself.
To get the IP address of your computer facing the Internet, here is a working receipe:
if=`netstat -nr | awk '{ if ($1 ~/default/) { print $6} }'`
ifconfig ${if} | awk '{ if ($1 ~/inet/) { print $2} }'
It should work even when you have multiple interfaces active, even when you have interfaces you don't know which one is actually the default gateway.
-
1This gets the internal network IP address (eg:
192.168.0.*)
, not the external one exposed to the internet.– SimplGyApr 30, 2015 at 5:30 -
Thank you for this feedback. Could you tell me on which version of the OS you are? Could you provide me the output of
netstat -nr | grep default
?– danApr 30, 2015 at 6:39 -
This gets the IP of the interface that serves in/outbound traffic. If you're behind NAT, that will give your LAN address, not WAN address. But it can be useful for a lot of purposes, and it doesn't reach out for network.– folexJan 11, 2019 at 11:25
Just for the record, you can make a bash script with the following content which gives you your external IP address
#!/bin/bash
wget -qO - http://ipecho.net/plain; echo
-
4By default
wget
is not a part of macOS and needs to be installed from a non-Apple source. Jan 7, 2019 at 9:39 -
Is the question macOS specific ? it is by default installed on many linux distributions. Jan 7, 2019 at 19:56
-
4This site is about Apple hardware and software, so macOS and iOS is presumed.– grg ♦Jan 7, 2019 at 20:47
-
4The default macOS command for this would be by using curl:
curl -s http://ipecho.net/plain; echo
– thibmaekFeb 11, 2019 at 10:32
This answer work on both mac and linux:
ifconfig | grep -E "([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}" | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | head -1 | awk '{ print $2 }'