How to get client public IP address at client side

core
1

Hello,

How to get client IP address at server side. I have tried “this.connection.clientAddress” but it’s not giving me proper public ip adress as from below snippet.

$.getJSON("http://jsonip.com?callback=?", function (data) {
console.log("Your ip: " + data.ip);
});

by using “this.connection.clientAddress” I am getting 127.0.0.1 as I am running my site on localhost:3000.

So, please provide me solution.

2

From the documentation:

If you’re running your Meteor server behind a proxy (so that clients are connecting to the proxy instead of to your server directly), you’ll need to set the HTTP_FORWARDED_COUNT environment variable for the correct IP address to be reported by clientAddress.

Set HTTP_FORWARDED_COUNT to an integer representing the number of proxies in front of your server. For example, you’d set it to “1” when your server was behind one proxy.

Have you tried this?

1 Like
3

this.connection.clientAddress is the proper way to get the client ip.

See http://ip-test-2.meteor.com/

Here’s the code https://github.com/krishamoud/meteor-ip-test

2 Likes
5

Hello khamoud,

By running http://ip-test-2.meteor.com/, I am getting IP address.

But I have created one meteor project and it’s running on localhost:3000, while writing this.connection.clientAddress at server side I am getting 127.0.0.1 IP address which is not correct, so could you please elaborate it more.

Thanks for your quick reply.

6

127.0.0.1 is the IPv4 version of localhost, since localhost is not a valid IPv4 address. The reason you can use localhost is because you have a host line in your /etc/hosts file mapping localhost to 127.0.0.1.

You cannot get your external IP-address when you’re running locally without using a workaround, which you can do with the HTTP library:

meteor add http

var res = HTTP.get('http://jsonip.com?callback=?');
console.log(res.data.ip); // Public IP (of server)

Note that when you deploy your app to production, you should replace that with this.connection.clientAddress since it will work as it should.

A thing you could do to avoid having to change things each time you deploy is to read the NODE_ENV environment variable.

var env = process.env.NODE_ENV;
var ip;
if (env === 'production') {
  ip = this.connection.clientAddress;
} else {
  ip = HTTP.get('http://jsonip.com?callback=?').data.ip;
}

This will require you to set the NODE_ENV to production every time you deploy, which is of course something you should always do (don’t know why Meteor docs on deploy doesn’t include that). To do this you could simply run export NODE_ENV=production on your server before starting your Meteor app.

3 Likes
7

Thanks svenskunganka,

I really appreciate your reply.

Thanks again.

1 Like
8

Thanks! This was the right answer for me.