Get your public IP, VPN/proxy status and risk score with one curl command

David Williams — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:01:44 +0000

Most "what's my IP" sites are built for browsers. Call them from a script and you get a full HTML page back, or you're asked to sign up for an API key just to read one line of text.

I run checkip.me, a free IP lookup service, and I wanted it to work well from a terminal. So this post is partly a how-to and partly a plug. Everything below works without an account or a key.

Just the IP

curl checkip.me

203.0.113.42

You get plain text back, which is what you want in a script. On Windows 10/11 use curl.exe, because in PowerShell curl is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest.

If you have both IPv4 and IPv6, curl may pick either one. Add -4 or -6 to choose:

curl -4 checkip.me
curl -6 checkip.me

Details, or a single field

/json gives you the network and location info for your own IP. Put another address in the path to look that one up instead:

curl checkip.me/json
curl checkip.me/1.1.1.1

{
  "ip": "203.0.113.42",
  "asn": "AS45899",
  "isp": "VNPT Corp",
  "country": "Vietnam",
  "city": "Hanoi",
  "timezone": "Asia/Bangkok",
  "vpn": false,
  "proxy": false,
  "tor": false,
  "hosting": false,
  ...
}

If you only need one value, add the field name to the path. It comes back as plain text, so you don't need jq:

curl checkip.me/country          # Vietnam
curl checkip.me/1.1.1.1/isp      # Cloudflare, Inc.
curl checkip.me/1.1.1.1/hosting  # true
curl checkip.me/vpn              # false

curl checkip.me/help lists every field.

A tiny dynamic DNS script

This is the most common reason to fetch your IP from a script. It remembers the last address and only does something when it changes:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

STATE_FILE="$HOME/.last_ip"
CURRENT=$(curl -fs -4 --max-time 10 checkip.me)
LAST=$(cat "$STATE_FILE" 2>/dev/null || true)

if [ "$CURRENT" != "$LAST" ]; then
  echo "IP changed: ${LAST:-none} -> $CURRENT"
  # call your DNS provider's API here
  echo "$CURRENT" > "$STATE_FILE"
fi

Run it from cron every few minutes. -f makes curl fail on an HTTP error instead of saving the error message as your "IP", -s keeps the progress meter out of the variable, and --max-time stops a slow network from hanging the job.

Locking SSH to your current IP with Terraform

If you manage a bastion host with Terraform, you can pass your address in at apply time:

variable "my_ip" {
  type = string
}

resource "aws_security_group_rule" "ssh_from_me" {
  type              = "ingress"
  from_port         = 22
  to_port           = 22
  protocol          = "tcp"
  cidr_blocks       = ["${var.my_ip}/32"]
  security_group_id = aws_security_group.bastion.id
}

terraform apply -var "my_ip=$(curl -s -4 checkip.me)"

Don't drop the -4. If curl picks IPv6, you end up with an IPv6 address followed by /32, and Terraform refuses it as an invalid CIDR block.

From code

CORS is enabled, so this works from a browser as well as from Node 18+. The JavaScript snippet uses top-level await, so run it in an ES module or the browser console.

import requests

ip = requests.get("https://checkip.me/ip", timeout=10).text.strip()
info = requests.get(f"https://checkip.me/{ip}", timeout=10).json()
print(ip, info["country"], info["isp"])

const info = await fetch("https://checkip.me/json").then(r => r.json());
console.log(info.ip, info.country, info.vpn);

Limits

Looking up your own IP has no limit. Looking up other IPs is capped at 60 per hour per visitor. Past that you get HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header.
Results for other IPs are cached, so they can be up to 30 days old.
Location comes from IP geolocation data. The country is usually right, but the city is often only approximate, like with every service of this kind.
The VPN, proxy and Tor flags are good hints, but don't rely on them for anything security-critical.

Docs are at checkip.me/api.

What would you add? I'm deciding which fields and endpoints come next, so tell me what you'd actually use.

I run checkip.me. I wrote this post with help from an AI assistant and tested every command before publishing.