Free IP API: your public IP from the command line

The one-line answer

Ask for the home page from a terminal and you get your public IP address, and nothing else:

curl ipcomet.com

The output is a single line, such as 203.0.113.7. The home page returns plain text when it recognises a command-line client (curl, wget, PowerShell, Python, Node and the like) by its User-Agent, and the full web page to everyone else. In a script, prefer /api/ip: it always returns plain text, whatever asks for it.

Endpoints

Every endpoint is a GET request over HTTPS to https://ipcomet.com, needs no key and answers in UTF-8. Errors come back as JSON — {"error": "…"} — with a matching HTTP status.

Only /api/ip and /api/me send Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, so those two are the ones you can also call from a web page in the browser. The rest are meant for command-line and server-side use. Answers are sent with Cache-Control: no-store, except the lookup, reputation and WHOIS replies, which allow private caching for one to five minutes.

Get your public IP address

The same request in the tools you are most likely to reach for. Each one prints one line.

curl

curl https://ipcomet.com/api/ip

wget

wget -qO- https://ipcomet.com/api/ip

macOS ships curl but not wget; most Linux distributions ship both.

PowerShell

(Invoke-RestMethod https://ipcomet.com/api/ip).Trim()

Windows 10 and 11 also include curl, but write curl.exe in PowerShell, where curl can be an alias for Invoke-WebRequest.

Python (requests)

import requests

r = requests.get("https://ipcomet.com/api/ip", timeout=10)
print(r.text.strip())

With the standard library instead, set a User-Agent of your own. Python's default (Python-urllib) is turned away by the bot protection in front of this site, which answers 403.

Node.js (fetch)

const res = await fetch("https://ipcomet.com/api/ip");
const ip = (await res.text()).trim();
console.log(ip);

No dependency needed: fetch is built into Node.js 18 and later, and the endpoint allows cross-origin requests, so the same two lines work in a browser page.

A shell one-liner for scripts

MYIP=$(curl -fsS --max-time 10 https://ipcomet.com/api/ip)
echo "$MYIP"

-f makes curl exit non-zero on an HTTP error instead of assigning the error body to the variable, -sS hides the progress meter but keeps real errors, and --max-time stops a stalled call from hanging a cron job. To act only when the address has changed, compare it with the last one you stored:

MYIP=$(curl -fsS --max-time 10 https://ipcomet.com/api/ip)
if [ "$MYIP" != "$(cat ~/.myip 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
  echo "Address changed to $MYIP"
  printf '%s' "$MYIP" > ~/.myip
fi

Your address, location and network as JSON

curl https://ipcomet.com/api/me

The reply describes the connection that made the request. With made-up values:

{
  "ip": "203.0.113.7",
  "version": 4,
  "city": "Mumbai",
  "region": "Maharashtra",
  "country": "India",
  "countryCode": "IN",
  "postal": "400001",
  "timezone": "Asia/Kolkata",
  "latitude": 19.076,
  "longitude": 72.8777,
  "asn": 64500,
  "org": "Example Broadband Ltd",
  "edge": "BOM",
  "protocol": "HTTP/2",
  "tls": "TLSv1.3 · AEAD-AES128-GCM-SHA256",
  "rttMs": 24
}

A field that cannot be determined for your connection is left out rather than set to null, so check that a key is there before using it. To pull out one value, pipe the reply through jq:

curl -s https://ipcomet.com/api/me | jq -r .country

The location is an estimate drawn from network records, not GPS, and it often points at your provider's nearest hub instead of your town. The About page explains where each field comes from and how far to trust it.

Look up any address or domain

These endpoints take a query string and return JSON. They call out to DNS resolvers, registries and blocklists, so they carry the tighter limits in the table above.

IP or domain lookup

curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/lookup?q=8.8.8.8"
curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/lookup?q=example.com"

A domain is resolved to its first A or AAAA record and that address is looked up, and the reply then carries resolvedFrom. It also carries hostname when the address has a reverse DNS record. As with /api/me, a field that cannot be determined is left out rather than set to null.

DNS records

curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/dns?name=example.com&type=MX"
curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/dns?name=example.com&resolver=google"
curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/dns?name=8.8.8.8"

type accepts A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, SOA and CAA; leave it out and all eight are fetched at once, grouped by type in a records object. resolver is cloudflare by default or google. Pass an IP address as name and you get its PTR record instead.

WHOIS and registration

curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/whois?q=example.com"
curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/whois?q=8.8.8.8"

Answers come from RDAP, the modern replacement for the WHOIS protocol. A domain reply carries the registrar, status, dates, nameservers and DNSSEC state; an IP reply carries the range, CIDR, owner and parent allocation.

Reputation and blocklists

curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/reputation?q=203.0.113.7"
curl https://ipcomet.com/api/reputation

Leave q off and your own address is checked. The reply says whether the address is a published Tor exit node, what kind of network owns it, and how it fares on five public blocklists. The network classification is a heuristic, not proof, and the blocklist checks cover IPv4 only.

Open port check

curl "https://ipcomet.com/api/port?port=443"

The check connects back to the address you are calling from, so it can only ever test your own connection, never someone else's host. state is open, closed or filtered. Port 25 cannot be tested from Cloudflare Workers and is refused.

Round-trip timing

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{time_total}s\n" https://ipcomet.com/api/ping

An empty 204 reply, as cheap to answer as it gets. The x-colo response header names the Cloudflare data center that handled it.

Rate limits and fair use

Limits are counted per calling IP address over a rolling minute, and the groups are counted separately from one another:

• 60 a minute for /api/lookup, /api/dns, /api/whois and /api/reputation.
• 10 a minute for /api/port, which opens a real TCP connection on every call.
• No fixed limit on /, /api/ip, /api/me and /api/ping, which are answered from the request itself without contacting anything else.

Going over a limit returns HTTP 429 and {"error": "Too many requests. Please wait a minute and try again."}. Wait a minute and carry on; nothing else happens to you.

“No fixed limit” is not an invitation to hammer it. Cloudflare's abuse protection sits in front of the whole site and can throttle or block traffic that looks automated at scale, so cache the answer instead of asking on every request — a home connection's public address rarely changes more than a few times a day. The speed test and proxy checker have endpoints of their own, but they are built around the browser tools here rather than around scripts, so they are undocumented and may change.

Privacy

There is no key, no account and no advertising. Your IP address is read from the incoming request, used to build the answer and then gone: ipcomet's own code does not write it to a database, a log or any other storage, and never sells or shares it. Cloudflare handles every request as the hosting provider under its own privacy policy, and the rate limiter uses your address only to count your recent requests.

The API endpoints load no analytics at all. On the pages of this site, analytics loads only if you accept it in the banner, and never otherwise. The privacy page sets out that choice and lists every third-party service each tool contacts.