Quite a long time I was searching for a good API to get my public IP address. You will find a lot of use cases for that. Some of my use cases:

1. Whether the VPN tunnel is working fine
2. Where is my ‘exit’ located at the moment?
3. For building an own DynDNS server with a RPi
4. Just verifying whether I am connected to the Internet

Just to mention some of possible use cases. I tested a lot of different APIs all over the Internet. I tried providers like ifconfig.me, curlmyip.com and some other APIs that are reachable and open for tools like curl. All of them have here and there some disadvantages. Most of them are just partially reachable, sometimes the API is just responding sporadically or even never.

Today I struggled about a new provider for that: ipinfo.io

The API and the usability of this API is just awesome within my tests. It reacts immediately and is very friendly to use.

As you can see I received a percent sign at the end of the last line (due to zsh). You can get rid of that with two different solutions. One would be:

When a partial line is preserved, by default you will see an inverse+bold character at the end of the partial line: a "%" for a normal user or a "#" for root. If set, the shell parameter PROMPT_EOL_MARK can be used to customize how the end of partial lines are shown.

Another, lets call it workaround and not solution 😉 , workaround would be to pipe the curl:

This API is offering you some additional features which I will introduce now.

As you probably already guessed, the names can be queried to get the proper value. This is a fact which I really like due to this I chose this API to be my API for querying my public IP address (and some additional information if I need them on top of that).

I do not want to forget to mention ipinfo.io also has a quite nice web UI.

As always: If you have any question feel free to contact me via the offered channels you can find on the page.

Cheers,
Miau