What's my IP address #

Sometimes you want to find out what public IP address your connection is using to reach the outside world.

An easy way to find this information is to use a DNS query, which I find to be a quicker way (and also a lighter weight query) instead of opening up a website to find this information.

OpenDNS #

OpenDNS has a service you can query from the command line which will return your IP address.

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

You can use this version of the query to find the public IPv6 address that your connection is using.

~$ dig +short aaaa myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

I've added this alias to my .zprofile in zsh so I simply have to type myip in the terminal on macOS to run the full command.

alias myip="dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com"

Alternatives #

There are a few alternatives to the OpenDNS query service.

Both Google ...

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

and Akamai ....

~$ dig @ns1-1.akamaitech.net ANY whoami.akamai.net +short

... both offer similar DNS lookup services. You can add them to your bash or zsh profile similar to the example above.