Every-now-and-then you have a need to retrieve your IP. Yeah, we all know you can go to IPChicken etc...and get it from there. I mean that is if you are a human and not a robot, right?

What if your app in a cloud has a need to retrieve user's IP? In my case, a Node Express app! Just like everyone I am flying in Amazon Cloud and so I stumbled upon Amazon's check-ip service. Simply clicking on http://checkip.amazonaws.com will return your IP address. All cool, but how exactly do you retrieve it through your app? Easy peasy!

I am using Node Js with Express.

First, I will create a simple route definition. Which will allow me to make a rest call like,

http://localhost:3000/cloud/ip

Here is my route definition.

router.get('/ip', cloud.getIp); // retrieve user ip address through amazon service

and here is my callback. Upon calling cloud.getIp my route will call this function.

const http = require('http');

const getIp = (req, res) => {
    let options = {
        host : 'checkip.amazonaws.com'
    };

    http.get (options, (ipdata) => {
               ipdata.on ('data', (ip) => {
            res.send ({ status : 'success', data : ip.toString().trim() });
        });
    }).on ('error', (e) => {
        res.send ({ status : 'failure', data : e });
    });
});

Now, curl the route or open up a REST client to retrieve the IP. Voila! Do you see your IP? Short and sweet, right?

Whoa! Node just chickened my IP!

Cheers!