How can I get the IP Address of a local computer?

In C++, what's the easiest way to get the local computer's IP address and subnet mask?

I want to be able to detect the local machine's IP address in my local network. In my particular case, I have a network with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and my computer's IP address is 192.168.0.5. I need to get these had two values programmatically in order to send a broadcast message to my network (in the form 192.168.0.255, for my particular case)

Edit: Many answers were not giving the results I expected because I had two different network IP's. Torial's code did the trick (it gave me both IP addresses).

Edit 2: Thanks to Brian R. Bondy for the info about the subnet mask.

Solution 1:

The question is trickier than it appears, because in many cases there isn't "an IP address for the local computer" so much as a number of different IP addresses. For example, the Mac I'm typing on right now (which is a pretty basic, standard Mac setup) has the following IP addresses associated with it:

fe80::1%lo0  
127.0.0.1 
::1 
fe80::21f:5bff:fe3f:1b36%en1 
10.0.0.138 
172.16.175.1
192.168.27.1

... and it's not just a matter of figuring out which of the above is "the real IP address", either... they are all "real" and useful; some more useful than others depending on what you are going to use the addresses for.

In my experience often the best way to get "an IP address" for your local computer is not to query the local computer at all, but rather to ask the computer your program is talking to what it sees your computer's IP address as. e.g. if you are writing a client program, send a message to the server asking the server to send back as data the IP address that your request came from. That way you will know what the relevant IP address is, given the context of the computer you are communicating with.

That said, that trick may not be appropriate for some purposes (e.g. when you're not communicating with a particular computer) so sometimes you just need to gather the list of all the IP addresses associated with your machine. The best way to do that under Unix/Mac (AFAIK) is by calling getifaddrs() and iterating over the results. Under Windows, try GetAdaptersAddresses() to get similar functionality. For example usages of both, see the GetNetworkInterfaceInfos() function in this file.

Solution 2:

The problem with all the approaches based on gethostbyname is that you will not get all IP addresses assigned to a particular machine. Servers usually have more than one adapter.

Here is an example of how you can iterate through all Ipv4 and Ipv6 addresses on the host machine:

void ListIpAddresses(IpAddresses& ipAddrs)
{
  IP_ADAPTER_ADDRESSES* adapter_addresses(NULL);
  IP_ADAPTER_ADDRESSES* adapter(NULL);

  // Start with a 16 KB buffer and resize if needed -
  // multiple attempts in case interfaces change while
  // we are in the middle of querying them.
  DWORD adapter_addresses_buffer_size = 16 * KB;
  for (int attempts = 0; attempts != 3; ++attempts)
  {
    adapter_addresses = (IP_ADAPTER_ADDRESSES*)malloc(adapter_addresses_buffer_size);
    assert(adapter_addresses);

    DWORD error = ::GetAdaptersAddresses(
      AF_UNSPEC, 
      GAA_FLAG_SKIP_ANYCAST | 
        GAA_FLAG_SKIP_MULTICAST | 
        GAA_FLAG_SKIP_DNS_SERVER |
        GAA_FLAG_SKIP_FRIENDLY_NAME, 
      NULL, 
      adapter_addresses,
      &adapter_addresses_buffer_size);

    if (ERROR_SUCCESS == error)
    {
      // We're done here, people!
      break;
    }
    else if (ERROR_BUFFER_OVERFLOW == error)
    {
      // Try again with the new size
      free(adapter_addresses);
      adapter_addresses = NULL;

      continue;
    }
    else
    {
      // Unexpected error code - log and throw
      free(adapter_addresses);
      adapter_addresses = NULL;

      // @todo
      LOG_AND_THROW_HERE();
    }
  }

  // Iterate through all of the adapters
  for (adapter = adapter_addresses; NULL != adapter; adapter = adapter->Next)
  {
    // Skip loopback adapters
    if (IF_TYPE_SOFTWARE_LOOPBACK == adapter->IfType)
    {
      continue;
    }

    // Parse all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
    for (
      IP_ADAPTER_UNICAST_ADDRESS* address = adapter->FirstUnicastAddress; 
      NULL != address;
      address = address->Next)
    {
      auto family = address->Address.lpSockaddr->sa_family;
      if (AF_INET == family)
      {
        // IPv4
        SOCKADDR_IN* ipv4 = reinterpret_cast<SOCKADDR_IN*>(address->Address.lpSockaddr);

        char str_buffer[INET_ADDRSTRLEN] = {0};
        inet_ntop(AF_INET, &(ipv4->sin_addr), str_buffer, INET_ADDRSTRLEN);
        ipAddrs.mIpv4.push_back(str_buffer);
      }
      else if (AF_INET6 == family)
      {
        // IPv6
        SOCKADDR_IN6* ipv6 = reinterpret_cast<SOCKADDR_IN6*>(address->Address.lpSockaddr);

        char str_buffer[INET6_ADDRSTRLEN] = {0};
        inet_ntop(AF_INET6, &(ipv6->sin6_addr), str_buffer, INET6_ADDRSTRLEN);

        std::string ipv6_str(str_buffer);

        // Detect and skip non-external addresses
        bool is_link_local(false);
        bool is_special_use(false);

        if (0 == ipv6_str.find("fe"))
        {
          char c = ipv6_str[2];
          if (c == '8' || c == '9' || c == 'a' || c == 'b')
          {
            is_link_local = true;
          }
        }
        else if (0 == ipv6_str.find("2001:0:"))
        {
          is_special_use = true;
        }

        if (! (is_link_local || is_special_use))
        {
          ipAddrs.mIpv6.push_back(ipv6_str);
        }
      }
      else
      {
        // Skip all other types of addresses
        continue;
      }
    }
  }

  // Cleanup
  free(adapter_addresses);
  adapter_addresses = NULL;

  // Cheers!
}

Solution 3:

You can use gethostname followed by gethostbyname to get your local interface internal IP.

This returned IP may be different from your external IP though. To get your external IP you would have to communicate with an external server that will tell you what your external IP is. Because the external IP is not yours but it is your routers.

//Example: b1 == 192, b2 == 168, b3 == 0, b4 == 100
struct IPv4
{
    unsigned char b1, b2, b3, b4;
};

bool getMyIP(IPv4 & myIP)
{
    char szBuffer[1024];

    #ifdef WIN32
    WSADATA wsaData;
    WORD wVersionRequested = MAKEWORD(2, 0);
    if(::WSAStartup(wVersionRequested, &wsaData) != 0)
        return false;
    #endif


    if(gethostname(szBuffer, sizeof(szBuffer)) == SOCKET_ERROR)
    {
      #ifdef WIN32
      WSACleanup();
      #endif
      return false;
    }

    struct hostent *host = gethostbyname(szBuffer);
    if(host == NULL)
    {
      #ifdef WIN32
      WSACleanup();
      #endif
      return false;
    }

    //Obtain the computer's IP
    myIP.b1 = ((struct in_addr *)(host->h_addr))->S_un.S_un_b.s_b1;
    myIP.b2 = ((struct in_addr *)(host->h_addr))->S_un.S_un_b.s_b2;
    myIP.b3 = ((struct in_addr *)(host->h_addr))->S_un.S_un_b.s_b3;
    myIP.b4 = ((struct in_addr *)(host->h_addr))->S_un.S_un_b.s_b4;

    #ifdef WIN32
    WSACleanup();
    #endif
    return true;
}

You can also always just use 127.0.0.1 which represents the local machine always.

Subnet mask in Windows:

You can get the subnet mask (and gateway and other info) by querying subkeys of this registry entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces

Look for the registry value SubnetMask.

Other methods to get interface information in Windows:

You could also retrieve the information you're looking for by using: WSAIoctl with this option: SIO_GET_INTERFACE_LIST