Get the IP address of a network interface by its name in Python on Linux an Mac OS X

How to get the IP address of a network interface by its name in Python on Linux and Mac OS X

Last Update: July 21, 2024

Get the IP address of a network interface by its name in Python, on Linux

To get the IP address of a network interface by its name in Python, you can use the socket and fcntl modules. Here’s a step-by-step approach:

Import the necessary modules.
Create a socket.
Use the fcntl.ioctl function to get the IP address of the specified network interface.

Here’s the code to achieve this:

# get_ip_linux.py
import socket
import fcntl
import struct
from typing import Optional

def get_ip_address(ifname: str) -> Optional[str]:
    s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
    try:
        ip_address = fcntl.ioctl(
            s.fileno(),
            0x8915,  # SIOCGIFADDR
            struct.pack('256s', ifname[:15].encode('utf-8'))
        )[20:24]
        return socket.inet_ntoa(ip_address)
    except IOError:
        return None

# Example usage
interface_name = 'eth0'  # Replace with your network interface name
ip_address = get_ip_address(interface_name)
if ip_address:
    print(f'The IP address of {interface_name} is {ip_address}')
else:
    print(f'Could not get the IP address of {interface_name}')

Sample output:

The IP address of eth0 is 192.168.1.110

In this example:

The get_ip_address function takes the network interface name (ifname) as an argument.
A socket is created using socket.socket.
The fcntl.ioctl function is used to get the IP address of the specified network interface. The 0x8915 constant is the request code for SIOCGIFADDR, which retrieves the address of the network interface.
The IP address is extracted from the result and converted to a human-readable format using socket.inet_ntoa.
The function returns the IP address or None if an error occurs.

Replace ’eth0’ with the name of your network interface to get its IP address.

Get the IP address of a network interface by its name in Python, on Mac OS X

import psutil
import socket

def get_ip_address(ifname: str) -> str:
    addrs = psutil.net_if_addrs()
    if ifname in addrs:
        for addr in addrs[ifname]:
            if addr.family == socket.AF_INET:
                return addr.address
    return None

# Example usage
ifname = 'en0'  # Replace with your network interface name
ip_address = get_ip_address(ifname)
if ip_address:
    print(f'The IP address of {ifname} is {ip_address}')
else:
    print(f'Could not get the IP address of {ifname}')

Sample output:

The IP address of en0 is 192.168.1.119

Explanation:

Import psutil: Import the psutil library.
Get Network Interface Addresses: Use psutil.net_if_addrs() to get a dictionary of network interfaces and their addresses.
Check Interface: Check if the specified interface name exists in the dictionary.
Retrieve IP Address: Iterate through the addresses of the interface and return the IPv4 address.
Handle Missing Interface: Return None if the interface or IPv4 address is not found.

References

psutil documentation

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