How to get your IP Address on Ubuntu

In this guide, we will be showing you how to get both the local and external IP address on the Ubuntu operating system.

Ubuntu Get IP Address

An IP address is a unique address that identifies your device within your local network or the wider internet.

Every device on a network, including your Ubuntu device, is given an IP address so others can access it on the network.

This guide will teach you how to retrieve your Ubuntu device’s local IP address using the terminal or desktop interface.

We will also show you a simple way you can use to get the external IP address from the Ubuntu terminal.

If you would like, you can configure Ubuntu to try and use a static IP address.

Getting the Local IP Address on Ubuntu using the Terminal

These sections show you how to get the IP addresses that a router assigned to your Ubuntu device.

We will show two different commands to best showcase getting the IP address. Both are easy to use but provide differing levels of information.

The first command is the hostname command. This command is the easiest to use as it only reveals the IP addresses themselves.

The second command is the ip command. You will want to use this command when you want to see what network adapter is assigning that IP address.

1. If you are using a desktop variant of Ubuntu, you will need to open the terminal first.

One of the fastest ways to open the terminal is to press CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

Get the IP Address on Ubuntu using the Hostname Command

2. With the terminal open, you can easily find the IP address using the hostname command. The advantage of this command is it will only give you IP addresses.

Using the “-I” option, we are telling the command to print all IP addresses assigned to your host.

hostname -I

3. After running this command, you will get the IP addresses assigned to your Ubuntu device.

For our example, you can see that we were only assigned a single local IP address.

192.168.0.43

Using the ip Command to get the IP Address on Ubuntu

2. Once the terminal is open, you can utilize the ip command to get your Ubuntu device’s IP addresses. You should use this command when you want to see what IP addresses are being assigned to individual network devices.

To list the IP addresses assigned to you, use the following command within the terminal.

ip show addr

3. Immediately, you will see that this command dumps you with a ton of information. It includes various details about your network adapters, including the mac address of each network device.

First, you can ignore the first network device (1: lo:). This device is the loopback device (127.0.0.1) and is used for Ubuntu to talk to itself.

Within each network adapter, you need to look for “inet” for the IPv4 address and “inet6” for the IPv6 address. The address is referenced immediately after that.

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether dc:a6:32:d3:28:99 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.0.43/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eth0
       valid_lft 65118sec preferred_lft 51345sec
    inet6 fe80::f9c9:e82d:97d2:185/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

The above example shows that our “eth0” adapter had two IP addresses assigned to it. One IPv4 address and one IPv6 address.

We can see that the IPv4 Address of our Ubuntu device is “192.168.0.43” and that our IPv6 address is “fe80::f9c9:e82d:97d2:185“.

Finding the Local IP Address in the Ubuntu Desktop Interface

It is also possible to get the IP address of your Ubuntu device through the desktop interface.

All you need is access to the settings on your device, and you can easily find both the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

While the following screenshots and steps are based on Ubuntu 22.04, these steps will be fairly similar for older and newer releases.

1. We will need to open the settings app before starting this section.

The easiest way to open the settings on Ubuntu is to click the top-right of the desktop interface (1.). Once the menu pops up, click the “Settings” page (2.).

Open Settings Panel

2. You need to change to the “Network” tab within the settings application (1.).

Once you are on the correct tab, you will see a list of network adapters available on your Ubuntu device.

Identify the adapter you want to get your IP address from, then click the cog icon next to it (2.).

Open Network Tab

3. You should now be greeted by the various details of this network adapter.

These details include your Ubuntu device’s IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Get Ubuntu IP Address

How to Get the External IP Address on Ubuntu

The IP addresses your Ubuntu device shows through its interface are typically local unless your router is handing you an external one.

If you need to get your Ubuntu device’s external IP address of your Ubuntu device, there is a quick command you can use within your terminal.

1. Before continuing, you must make sure you have curl installed on Ubuntu. Curl is an application that allows us to make a web request easily.

To install this tool, you need to run the following two commands. The first command updates the package list, and the second installs curl.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl

2. Now that we know curl is installed on our device we can grab the external IP address.

We achieve this by making a request to an external service. For this command, we will this request to “api64.ipfy.org“. You can read more about ipfy from their official website.

curl api64.ipify.org

After running the above command, you should get your Ubuntu device’s external IP address in your terminal.

The service that we are making the request to will provide either an IPv4 or IPv6 address, depending on what was used during the connection.

If you only want an IPv4 address, replace “api64” with “api“.

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Conclusion

Throughout this tutorial, we showed you a few different ways you can get your IP address on Ubuntu.

An IP address is a unique way of identifying your specific device on a larger network.

Please comment below if you have any questions about getting your IP address.

We also have numerous other Ubuntu tutorials that you can check out. Also, be sure to check out our general Linux guides.

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