ipify – /home/liquidat

[Short Tip] Retrieve your public IP with Ansible

There are multiple sources where variables for Ansible can be defined. Most of them can be shown via the setup module, but there are more. For example, if you use a dynamic inventory script to access a Satellite server many variables like the organization are provided via the inventory script – and these are not […]

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.