[Short Tip] Retrieve your public IP with Ansible

There are multiple situations where you need to know your public IP: be it that you set up your home IT server behind a NAT, be it that your legacy enterprise business solution does not work properly without this information because the original developers 20 years ago never expected to be behind a NAT.

Of course, Ansible can help here as well: there is a tiny, neat module called ipify_facts which does nothing else but retrieving your public IP:

$ ansible localhost -m ipify_facts
localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "ipify_public_ip": "23.161.144.221"
    }, 
    "changed": false
}

The return value can be registered as a variable and reused in other tasks:

---
- name: get public IP
  hosts: all 

  tasks:
    - name: get public IP
      ipify_facts:
      register: public_ip
    - name: output
      debug: msg="{{ public_ip }}"

The module by default accesses https://api.ipify.org to get the IP address, but the api URL can be changed via parameter.

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