How to easily get your public / WAN IP address through a public API

I’ve had this desire in the back of my mind to create a simple way for programmers / devops / sysadmins or whoever, to get their public IP through an API.

What ended up pushing me over the edge was a requirement at work to automatically add newly provisioned servers to a Google Cloud SQL instance, allowing access to one of our MySQL databases.

I knew there were tons of sites out there that could already provide you with your WAN IP, but they were all HTML based, bulky and slow. I needed a fast, reliable and lightweight way to get this information.

I started hunting for domain names that would fit what I was going for. The only thing available at the .com level and made any sense at all was myjsonip.com.

The goal initially was to create a site that would return my public IP in a JSON object. As I started working on it and moving forward, I decided to add additional formats. The site now support getting your IP address in JSON, YAML and XML. Furthermore, I decided to open source the project. You can find the source code on github. Enjoy! It’s small, simple, versatile and fast.