Find local non-loopback ip address in Python

Question

How can I find a list of local non-loopback IP addresses in Python (and stay platform-independent)?

Answer 1

The netifaces package provides a platform-independent way of getting network interface and address info. The ipaddress package (standard in Python3, external in Python2) provides a handy is_loopback method.

It's not exactly trivial, but here is some code that worked at least once for me:

import netifaces
import ipaddress
from pprint import pprint


def get_local_non_loopback_ipv4_addresses():
    for interface in netifaces.interfaces():
        # Not all interfaces have an IPv4 address:
        if netifaces.AF_INET in netifaces.ifaddresses(interface):
            # Some interfaces have multiple IPv4 addresses:
            for address_info in netifaces.ifaddresses(interface)[netifaces.AF_INET]:
                address_object = ipaddress.IPv4Address(unicode(address_info['addr'], 'utf-8'))
                if not address_object.is_loopback:
                    yield address_info['addr']

pprint(list(get_local_non_loopback_ipv4_addresses()))

That address_info variable will also have netmask and broadcast keys you can access for more info.

The IPv4Address object also has is_private and is_global methods you can use for similar queries.