I liked the http://ipify.org. They even provide Python code for using their API.

# This example requires the requests library be installed.  You can learn more

# about the Requests library here: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/



from requests import get



ip = get('https://api.ipify.org').text

print 'My public IP address is:', ip

Python3, using nothing else but the standard library

As mentioned before, one cannot get around using an external service of some sorts in order to discover the external IP address of your router.

Here is how it is done with python3, using nothing else but the standard library:

import urllib.request



external_ip = urllib.request.urlopen('https://ident.me').read().decode('utf8')



print(external_ip)

You should use the UPnP protocol to query your router for this information. Most importantly, this does not rely on an external service, which all the other answers to this question seem to suggest.

There's a Python library called miniupnp which can do this, see e.g. miniupnpc/testupnpigd.py.

pip install miniupnpc

Based on their example you should be able to do something like this:

import miniupnpc



u = miniupnpc.UPnP()

u.discoverdelay = 200

u.discover()

u.selectigd()

print('external ip address: {}'.format(u.externalipaddress()))

If you think and external source is too unreliable, you could pool a few different services. For most ip lookup pages they require you to scrape html, but a few of them that have created lean pages for scripts like yours - also so they can reduce the hits on their sites:

• 
  automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp (Update: whatismyip has taken this service down)


• whatismyip.org

In my opinion the simplest solution is

    f = requests.request('GET', 'http://myip.dnsomatic.com')

    ip = f.text

Thats all.

I tried most of the other answers on this question here and came to find that most of the services used were defunct except one.

Here is a script that should do the trick and download only a minimal amount of information:

#!/usr/bin/env python



import urllib

import re



def get_external_ip():

    site = urllib.urlopen("http://checkip.dyndns.org/").read()

    grab = re.findall('([0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+)', site)

    address = grab[0]

    return address



if __name__ == '__main__':

  print( get_external_ip() )

import requests

import re





def getMyExtIp():

    try:

        res = requests.get("http://whatismyip.org")

        myIp = re.compile('(d{1,3}.){3}d{1,3}').search(res.text).group()

        if myIp != "":

            return myIp

    except:

        pass

    return "n/a"

If the machine is being a firewall then your solution is a very sensible one: the alternative being able to query the firewall which ends-up being very dependent on the type of firewall (if at all possible).

The most simple (non python) working solution I can think of is

wget -q -O- icanhazip.com

I'd like to add a very short Python3 solution which makes use of the JSON API of http://hostip.info.

from urllib.request import urlopen

import json

url = 'http://api.hostip.info/get_json.php'

info = json.loads(urlopen(url).read().decode('utf-8'))

print(info['ip'])

You can of course add some error checking, a timeout condition and some convenience:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from urllib.request import urlopen

from urllib.error import URLError

import json



try:

    url = 'http://api.hostip.info/get_json.php'

    info = json.loads(urlopen(url, timeout = 15).read().decode('utf-8'))

    print(info['ip'])

except URLError as e:

    print(e.reason, end=' ') # e.g. 'timed out'

    print('(are you connected to the internet?)')

except KeyboardInterrupt:

    pass

In [1]: import stun



stun.get_ip_info()

('Restric NAT', 'xx.xx.xx.xx', 55320)

Working with Python 2.7.6 and 2.7.13

import urllib2  

req = urllib2.Request('http://icanhazip.com', data=None)  

response = urllib2.urlopen(req, timeout=5)  

print(response.read())

Just as an alternative. Here's a script you can try out.

As Sunny has suggested, its not possible in general to get external ip-address being inside a network without any help from external services.
Have a look at the following tutorial which covers exactly the same thing. I guess it works for Python 2.5.X.
http://codetempo.com/programming/python/monitoring-ip-addresses-of-your-computer-start-up-script-on-linux-ubuntu

It says that tutorial is for Linux but works for other platforms with python too.

ipWebCode = urllib.request.urlopen("http://ip.nefsc.noaa.gov").read().decode("utf8")

ipWebCode=ipWebCode.split("color=red> ")

ipWebCode = ipWebCode[1]

ipWebCode = ipWebCode.split("</font>")

externalIp = ipWebCode[0]

this is a short snippet I had written for another program. The trick was finding a simple enough website so that dissecting the html wasn't a pain.

Here's another alternative script.

def track_ip():

   """

   Returns Dict with the following keys:

   - ip

   - latlong

   - country

   - city

   - user-agent

   """



   conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.trackip.net")

   conn.request("GET", "/ip?json")

   resp = conn.getresponse()

   print resp.status, resp.reason



   if resp.status == 200:

       ip = json.loads(resp.read())

   else:

       print 'Connection Error: %s' % resp.reason



   conn.close()

   return ip

EDIT: Don't forget to import httplib and json

If you're just writing for yourself and not for a generalized application, you might be able to find the address on the setup page for your router and then scrape it from that page's html. This worked fine for me with my SMC router. One read and one simple RE search and I've found it.

My particular interest in doing this was to let me know my home IP address when I was away from home, so I could get back in via VNC. A few more lines of Python stores the address in Dropbox for outside access, and even emails me if it sees a change. I've scheduled it to happen on boot and once an hour thereafter.

Use this script :

import urllib, json



data = json.loads(urllib.urlopen("http://ip.jsontest.com/").read())

print data["ip"]

Without json :

import urllib, re



data = re.search('"([0-9.]*)"', urllib.urlopen("http://ip.jsontest.com/").read()).group(1)

print data

There are a few other ways that do not rely on Python checking an external web site, however the OS can. Your primary issue here, is that even if you were not using Python, if you were using the command line, there are no "built-in" commands that can just simply tell you the external (WAN) IP. Commands such as "ip addr show" and "ifconfig -a" show you the server's IP address's within the network. Only the router actually holds the external IP. However, there are ways to find the external IP address (WAN IP) from the command line.

These examples are:

http://ipecho.net/plain ; echo

curl ipinfo.io/ip

dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

dig TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com

Therefore, the python code would be:

import os

ip = os.popen('wget -qO- http://ipecho.net/plain ; echo').readlines(-1)[0].strip()

print ip

OR

import os

iN, out, err = os.popen3('curl ipinfo.io/ip')

iN.close() ; err.close()

ip = out.read().strip()

print ip

OR

import os

ip = os.popen('dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com').readlines(-1)[0].strip()

print ip

Or, plug any other of the examples above, into a command like os.popen, os.popen2, os.popen3, or os.system.

If you don't want to use external services (IP websites, etc.) You can use the UPnP Protocol.

Do to that we use a simple UPnP client library (https://github.com/flyte/upnpclient)

Install:

pip install upnpclient

Simple Code:

import upnpclient



devices = upnpclient.discover()



if(len(devices) > 0):

    externalIP = devices[0].WANIPConn1.GetExternalIPAddress()

    print(externalIP)

else:

    print('No Connected network interface detected')

Full Code (to get more information as mentioned in the github readme)

In [1]: import upnpclient



In [2]: devices = upnpclient.discover()



In [3]: devices

Out[3]: 

[<Device 'OpenWRT router'>,

 <Device 'Harmony Hub'>,

 <Device 'walternate: root'>]



In [4]: d = devices[0]



In [5]: d.WANIPConn1.GetStatusInfo()

Out[5]: 

{'NewConnectionStatus': 'Connected',

 'NewLastConnectionError': 'ERROR_NONE',

 'NewUptime': 14851479}



In [6]: d.WANIPConn1.GetNATRSIPStatus()

Out[6]: {'NewNATEnabled': True, 'NewRSIPAvailable': False}



In [7]: d.WANIPConn1.GetExternalIPAddress()

Out[7]: {'NewExternalIPAddress': '123.123.123.123'}

Use requests module:

import requests



myip = requests.get('https://www.wikipedia.org').headers['X-Client-IP']



print("n[+] Public IP: "+myip)

As simple as running this in Python3:

import os



externalIP  = os.popen('curl -s ifconfig.me').readline()

print(externalIP)