Finding the IP address for a specific interface on your machine

Finding the IP address of a particular network interface may be needed from your Python network application.

Getting ready

This recipe is prepared exclusively for a Linux box. There are some Python modules specially designed to bring similar functionalities on Windows and macOS platforms. For example, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/ for Windows-specific implementation.

How to do it...

You can use the fnctl module to query the IP address on your machine.

Listing 3.5 shows us how to find the IP address for a specific interface on your machine, as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition -- Chapter - 3 
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
 
import argparse 
import sys 
import socket 
import fcntl 
import struct 
import array 
 
 
def get_ip_address(ifname): 
    s = socket.socket(socket...