Getting your public IP from a PowerShell script

January 14, 2009

I often work on computers at different locations, and often, I need to know what public IP I am using to connect to the internet. Of course, this is easy to find out - I can just go to a website that tells me my IP, such as http://myip.dk/.

But I find this to be suboptimal. If I am configuring something, finding the IP involves firing up a browser, going to the site, and copying the IP displayed. It is a speed bump when I am trying to be productive - and the display-my-ip sites are often covered in commercials, which I dislike.

So today, I decided to write a PowerShell script that can tell me my current public IP address. First, I needed a reliable way of finding it. Of course, I could just screen-scrape off a site such as http://myip.dk/, but it has some disadvantages. I can't know if the html structure will change - and it would mean that I would have to download all of the HTML just to get a few bytes of IP address. Furthermore, I don't know whether it would be legal at all.

Therefore, I started by writing a small ASP .NET HTTP handler, that could tell me my IP. I put the following simple code in the ProcessRequest method:

 1:     public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context) {

 2:         context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";

 3:         context.Response.AddHeader("X-RemoteIP", HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress);

 4:         context.Response.Write(HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress);

 5:     }

This simply writes the IP address the handler is accessed with, to the response as well as to a custom http header. I then deployed this handler to my website.

Next, writing the PowerShell script, was equally simple; we can simply use the handy System.Net.WebClient class:

 1: $ipFinderHost = "http://www.somedomain.org/GetIP.ashx"

 2: $c = new-object System.Net.WebClient

 3: $c.DownloadString($ipFinderHost)

And voila, I have a PowerShell script that displays my public IP address. And, since I have the PowerShell Community Extensions installed, I can use the set-clipboard cmdlet to copy it to the clipboard.

 1: get-myip | set-clipboard

Much nicer than manually copying from the text in a browser :-) If you decide to use this script yourself, obviously you will need to change the URL in the script to where you have deployed the GetIP.ashx handler.