ifaddr - Enumerate IP addresses on the local network adapters

ifaddr is a small Python library that allows you to find all the IP addresses of the computer. It is tested on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

This library is open source and released under the MIT License.

You can install it with pip install ifaddr. It doesn’t need to compile anything, so there shouldn’t be any surprises. Even on Windows.

Let’s get going!

import ifaddr

adapters = ifaddr.get_adapters()

for adapter in adapters:
    print "IPs of network adapter " + adapter.nice_name
    for ip in adapter.ips:
        print "   %s/%s" % (ip.ip, ip.network_prefix)

This will print:

IPs of network adapter H5321 gw Mobile Broadband Driver
   IP ('fe80::9:ebdf:30ab:39a3', 0L, 17L)/64
   IP 169.254.57.163/16
IPs of network adapter Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205
   IP ('fe80::481f:3c9d:c3f6:93f8', 0L, 12L)/64
   IP 192.168.0.51/24
IPs of network adapter Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection
   IP ('fe80::85cd:e07e:4f7a:6aa6', 0L, 11L)/64
   IP 192.168.0.53/24
IPs of network adapter Software Loopback Interface 1
   IP ('::1', 0L, 0L)/128
   IP 127.0.0.1/8

You get both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The later complete with flowinfo and scope_id.

API

The library has only one function:

ifaddr.get_adapters()

Receives all the network adapters with their IP addresses.

Returns:List of ifaddr.Adapter instances in the order they are provided by the operating system.

And two simple classes:

class ifaddr.Adapter(name, nice_name, ips)

Represents a network interface device controller (NIC), such as a network card. An adapter can have multiple IPs.

On Linux aliasing (multiple IPs per physical NIC) is implemented by creating ‘virtual’ adapters, each represented by an instance of this class. Each of those ‘virtual’ adapters can have both a IPv4 and an IPv6 IP address.

ips = None

List of ifaddr.IP instances in the order they were reported by the system.

name = None

Unique name that identifies the adapter in the system. On Linux this is of the form of eth0 or eth0:1, on Windows it is a UUID in string representation, such as {846EE342-7039-11DE-9D20-806E6F6E6963}.

nice_name = None

Human readable name of the adpater. On Linux this is currently the same as name. On Windows this is the name of the device.

class ifaddr.IP(ip, network_prefix, nice_name)

Represents an IP address of an adapter.

ip = None

IP address. For IPv4 addresses this is a string in “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” format. For IPv6 addresses this is a three-tuple (ip, flowinfo, scope_id), where ip is a string in the usual collon separated hex format.

network_prefix = None

Number of bits of the IP that represent the network. For a 255.255.255.0 netmask, this number would be 24.

nice_name = None

Human readable name for this IP. On Linux is this currently the same as the adapter name. On Windows this is the name of the network connection as configured in the system control panel.

Bug Reports and other contributions

This project is hosted here ifaddr github page.

Alternatives

Alastair Houghton develops netifaces which can do everything this library can, and more. The only drawback is that it needs to be compiled, which can make the installation difficult.