I'm using now.js and there's this line that refers to localhost. In order for someone to access the server outside I need to modify localhost to be the current external ip of my computer(my ip is dynamic). Is there any way to detect the current external ip from the script?
window.now = nowInitialize("//localhost:8081", {});
You could ask an external service like this one (which is nice because it returns it without formatting).
To use it, you could use Node's built in http
module:
require('http').request({
hostname: 'fugal.org',
path: '/ip.cgi',
agent: false
}, function(res) {
if(res.statusCode != 200) {
throw new Error('non-OK status: ' + res.statusCode);
}
res.setEncoding('utf-8');
var ipAddress = '';
res.on('data', function(chunk) { ipAddress += chunk; });
res.on('end', function() {
// ipAddress contains the external IP address
});
}).on('error', function(err) {
throw err;
});
Keep in mind that external services can go down or change — this has happened once already, invalidating this answer. I've updated it, but this could happen again…