ipify

README

go-ipify

The official client library for ipify: A Simple IP Address API.

Meta

• Author: Randall Degges
• Email: r@rdegges.com
• Site: http://www.rdegges.com
• Status: maintained, active

Purpose

ipify is the best IP address lookup service on the internet. It's fast, simple, scalable, open source, and well-funded (by me!).

In short: if you need a way to pragmatically get your public IP address, ipify is the best possible choice!

This library will retrieve your public IP address from ipify's API service, and return it as a string. It can't get any simpler than that.

This library also has some other nice features you might care about:

• If a request fails for any reason, it is re-attempted 3 times using an exponential backoff algorithm for maximum effectiveness.
• This library handles errors properly, and usage examples below show you how to deal with errors in a foolproof way.
• This library only makes API requests over HTTPS.

Installation

To install ipify, simply run:

$ go get github.com/rdegges/go-ipify

This will install the latest version of the library automatically.

Usage

Using this library is very simple. Here's a simple example:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/rdegges/go-ipify"
)

func main() {
    ip, err := ipify.GetIp()
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println("Couldn't get my IP address:", err)
    } else {
        fmt.Println("My IP address is:", ip)
    }
}

Now, in regards to error handling, there are several ways this can fail:

• The ipify service is down (not likely), or:
• Your machine is unable to get the request to ipify because of a network error of some sort (DNS, no internet, etc.).

The library will output an informative error message in the event anything fails.

One thing to keep in mind: regardless of how you decide to handle errors, the ipify library will retry any failed requests 3 times before ever failing -- so if you do need to handle errors, just remember that retry logic has already been attempted.

Contributing

This project is only possible due to the amazing contributors who work on it!

If you'd like to improve this library, please send me a pull request! I'm happy to review and merge pull requests.

The standard contribution workflow should look something like this:

• Fork this project on Github.
• Make some changes in the master branch (this project is simple, so no need to complicate things).
• Send a pull request when ready.

Also, if you're making changes, please write tests for your changes -- this project has a full test suite you can easily modify / test.

To run the test suite, you can use the go test command after forking this repository.

Documentation

Overview

Package ipify provides a single function for retrieving your computer's public IP address from the ipify service: http://www.ipify.org

Index

• Constants
• Variables
• func GetIp() (string, error)

Constants

const MAX_TRIES = 3

The maximum amount of tries to attempt when making API calls.

const VERSION = "1.0.0"

The version of this library.

Variables

var API_URI = "https://api.ipify.org"

This is the ipify service base URI. This is where all API requests go.

var USER_AGENT = fmt.Sprintf(
	"go-ipify/%s go/%s %s",
	VERSION,
	runtime.Version()[2:],
	strings.Title(runtime.GOOS),
)

The user-agent string is provided so that I can (eventually) keep track of what libraries to support over time. EG: Maybe the service is used primarily by Windows developers, and I should invest more time in improving those integrations.

Functions

func GetIp

func GetIp() (string, error)

GetIp queries the ipify service (http://www.ipify.org) to retrieve this machine's public IP address. Returns your public IP address as a string, and any error encountered. By default, this function will run using exponential backoff -- if this function fails for any reason, the request will be retried up to 3 times.

Usage:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/rdegges/go-ipify"
)

func main() {
	ip, err := ipify.GetIp()
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println("Couldn't get my IP address:", err)
	} else {
		fmt.Println("My IP address is:", ip)
	}
}