ipify-api

A Simple Public IP Address API

This repository contains the source code for ipify, one of the largest and most popular IP address API services on the internet. ipify serves over 30 billion requests per month!

What does ipify do?

Have you ever needed to pragmatically get your public IP address? This is quite common for developers provisioning cloud servers, for instance, where you might be creating servers and running bootstrapping software on them without access to server metadata.

Being able to quickly and reliably get access to your public IP address is essential for configuring DNS, managing external services, and a number of other operationally related tasks.

In general, there are a number of uses for public IP address information.

What is ipify?

ipify is a free API service anyone can use to get their public IP address. It is highly reliable (built on top of Heroku) and fast. Typical response times (server side) are between 1ms and 10ms.

ipify is also fully funded -- it's been running for years and isn't going anywhere. The people behind ipify cover all expenses and maintenance, so you can feel safe integrating with it knowing it won't be disappearing.

If you'd like to use ipify in your application, no permission is needed. You can immediately start using the service without any restrictions. Simply visit our public website for more information.

What is this project?

This project is the source code that powers the ipify service. ipify is written in the Go programming language for speed and efficiency purposes. You can read an article written by ipify's creator, Randall Degges, if you'd like more information.

If you'd like to contribute to ipify's development, you can do so here. Pull requests are encouraged.

Finally, if you'd like to deploy your own instance of ipify, you can easily do so. Compiling this project will produce a single statically linked binary that is designed to be run on Heroku. With minor modification, ipify can be ran on any web hosting platform.

Please contact Randall if you need assistance deploying your own copy of ipify onto a non-Heroku host.

Building ipify

To develop and build ipify, you'll need to have the Go programming language setup on your computer. If you don't, you can read more about it here: https://golang.org/

Once you have Go installed, you'll need to clone this project into your computer's GOPATH. For me, this means I'll typically do something like:

$ git clone https://github.com/rdegges/ipify-api.git ~/go/src/github.com/rdegges/ipify-api

To build the project, change to the project directory and run:

$ go build

This will create the ipify-api binary in the current directory that you can use for testing.

Deploying ipify

If you'd like to deploy your own version of ipify to Heroku, you can do so easily by clicking the button below. This will take you to Heroku and let you instantly provision your own copy of the ipify service.

Questions?

Got a question? Please create a Github issue!