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. Other BSD derivatives like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD should work too, but I haven’t personally tested those.

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.

Changelog

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: str, nice_name: str, ips: List[IP], index: int | None = None, multicast: bool = True)[source]¶

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.

index: int | None¶: Adapter index as used by some API (e.g. IPv6 multicast group join).

ips: List[IP]¶: List of ifaddr.IP instances in the order they were reported by the system.

multicast: bool¶: If this adapter supports multicast

name: str¶: 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: str¶: Human readable name of the adapter. On Linux this is currently the same as name. On Windows this is the name of the device.

class ifaddr.IP(ip: IPv4Ext | IPv6Ext, network_prefix: int, nice_name: str)[source]¶

Represents an IP address of an adapter.

ip: tuple[str, int, int] | str¶: 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.

property is_IPv4: bool¶: Returns True if this IP is an IPv4 address and False if it is an IPv6 address.

property is_IPv6: bool¶: Returns True if this IP is an IPv6 address and False if it is an IPv4 address.

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

nice_name: str¶: 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.