Get real IP address in local Rails development env

Question

I have Rails 2.3.8, Ruby 1.8.7, Mongrel Web Server and MySQL database.

I am in the development mode and I need to find the real IP address

When I use request.remote_ip I am getting the IP as 127.0.0.1

I know I am getting 127.0.0.1 because I am developing on the local machine.. but is there a way to get the real ip-address even if I am on the local machine?

I am using these mentioned below in my controller and all I get is 127.0.0.1 with all of them in the view.

request.remote_ip
request.env["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]
request.remote_addr
request.env['REMOTE_ADDR']

Answer 1

I am testing with Rspec and what I did was:

request.stub(:remote_ip).and_return('198.172.43.34')
Instance.stub(:find_by_key).and_return(@instance)
before = @instance.weekly_statistic.times_opened_by['198.172.43.34']

get :key, :key=>"314C00"

@instance.weekly_statistic.times_opened_by['198.172.43.34'].should == before+1

And it worked like a charm! : )

Answer 2

I don't think you will get your 'real-ip' on localhost and the reason for this actually lies in TCP/IP.

The remote ip address depends upon the network the request is being sent to. Since it is a part of TCP/IP to send your IP address when communicating, it always translates to relative IP address that the destination computer may understand. When the request is within your subnet, it is your local IP. The moment it goes out to the network through your service provider, it assumes a global IP, which can be tracked back to the service provider (Note: this is arguable and depends on your network setup).

So if you are testing locally then it would be 127.0.0.1 as you have experienced. If you are sending it over your local network, it'll be your IP within that network. For example, my machine's IP in my office network is 192.168.1.7, and if I access my app at 3000 port through another computer in the same network, say from 192.168.1.13, then I get the request.remote_ip as 192.168.1.13

What this is means is, while you are on localhost, 127.0.0.1 is your real IP. And likewise in the example I mentioned, 192.168.1.13 is the real IP for the machine that sent the request.

Answer 3

If you access the development machine with your real IP you should get your real IP, so don't use localhost, but your use your real IP. Not all routers are will allow LAN access to a machine to an external IP address that is actually on that LAN, but most will.

Answer 4

Problem:

We were trying to do a similar thing for a project recently and were having trouble using request.remote_ip in our code. It kept returning 127.0.0.1 or ::1. When combined with the Geocoder gem it was giving us an empty array and was basically useless.

Solution:

There's a really nice API at telize.com which returns the IP address of whatever hits it. The code we implemented looked something like this:

location = Geocoder.search(HTTParty.get('http://www.telize.com/ip').body)

It's not the most rails-y way to do it, but I think this is a pretty good solution since it will work locally and on production as well. The only potential problem is if you hit their API limit, but for small projects this should be a non-issue.

Answer 5

Depends on how you access the url.

If you access the url using http://127.0.0.1/.... or http://localhost/.... , you'll get 127.0.0.1 as the remote ip. If you are on a LAN, use http://{lan-ip}/....

for e.g. http://172.20.25.210/.......

Answer 6

This is what I normally do nowadays:

if Rails.env.production?
  request.remote_ip
else
  Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse('http://checkip.amazonaws.com/')).squish
end