How to get the public ip address of current host

Monday, 22 August 2011 17:13

In a virtual host, or when your application could run on a multiple type of OS,
it could be difficult to get the IP address corresponding to your default gateway.

Here a solution, which should be 'universal'.

This snippets try to send a datagramme on a distant host (no matter if datagrame
arrive), and



Socket.do_not_reverse_lookup=true



def get_public_ip()

  UDPSocket.open do |s|

    s.connect '208.80.152.2', 1 # wikipedia, connection don't need effective

    s.addr.last

  end

end

This option must be positionned :



 Socket.do_not_reverse_lookup=true

If not, your ruby machine will try to find DNS name of wikipedia, which could
take a very long time if host is isolated.