How do I find my computer's IP address using the bash shell?

Question

Every now and again, I need to start the Django development server, and have it viewable by other machines on my network, as described here:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#runserver

My machine’s IP address tends to change every now and again, so I’d like to have a little shell alias or something that spits out the manage.py command with my machine’s current IP address, maybe like this:

python manage.py runserver $(COMMAND TO FIND MY MACHINE’S IP ADDRESS GOES HERE):8000

Answer 1

This seems to work on the bash shell on OS X 10.5.6:

ifconfig | grep 'inet ' | grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -c 7-17

Adapted from here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/read-unixlinux-system-ip-address-in-a-shell-script.html

Answer 2

ifconfig is probably what you're after. You'll need to either run it through grep to filter out some of the noise though.

Answer 3

You might already be aware, but running

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

makes your machine visible to everyone on the network.

Is there a reason you'd need to specify your IP?

Answer 4

I would say by using ifconfig, but to me the command would look a little bit more like that :

ifconfig [interface name] | grep inet | grep -v inet6 | cut -d ":" -f 2 | cut -d " " -f 1

considering you know which interface you need, and you want the ipv4 version, not the ipv6.

Answer 5

Here a solution to find the current IP address:

route -n get default|grep interface|awk ‘{ print $2 }’|xargs ipconfig getifaddr

tested on Mac only.