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• 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 exceptions 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:

$ pip install ipify

This will install the latest version of the library automatically.

Usage

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

>>> from ipify import get_ip
>>> ip = get_ip()
>>> ip
u'96.41.136.144'

Now, in regards to exception 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.).

Here’s how you can handle all of these edge cases:

from ipify import get_ip
from ipify.exceptions import ConnectionError, ServiceError

try:
    ip = get_ip()
except ConnectionError:
    # If you get here, it means you were unable to reach the ipify service,
    # most likely because of a network error on your end.
except ServiceError:
    # If you get here, it means ipify is having issues, so the request
    # couldn't be completed :(
except:
    # Something else happened (non-ipify related). Maybe you hit CTRL-C
    # while the program was running, the kernel is killing your process, or
    # something else all together.

If you want to simplify the above error handling, you could also do the following (it will catch any sort of ipify related errors regardless of what type they may be):

from ipify import get_ip
from ipify.exceptions import IpifyException

try:
    ip = get_ip()
except IpifyException:
    # If you get here, then some ipify exception occurred.
except:
    # If you get here, some non-ipify related exception occurred.

One thing to keep in mind: regardless of how you decide to handle exceptions, the ipify library will retry any failed requests 3 times before ever raising exceptions – so if you do need to handle exceptions, 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 following commands:

$ pip install -e .
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python manage.py test

Change Log

All library changes, in descending order.