Locating IP addresses for an instance

Learn how to locate external and internal IP addresses for your instance.

Before you begin

If you want to use the command-line examples in this guide:
1. Install or update to the latest version of the gcloud command-line tool.
2. Set a default region and zone.
If you want to use the API examples in this guide, set up API access.

Permissions required for this task

To perform this task, you must have the following permissions:

compute.instances.get on the instance

Viewing IP addresses

You view the internal and external IP addresses for your instance through either the Google Cloud Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or the Compute Engine API.

Console

In the Google Cloud Console, go to the VM instances page. If the VM instance has an external IP address, it appears under the External IP column. If a VM does not have an external IP address, you can assign one.

Go to the VM instances page

VM instances page showing internal and external IPs.

gcloud

To view the internal and external IP addresses for your instance using gcloud compute, use the instances list sub-command.

gcloud compute instances list

Your output should resemble the following:

NAME              ZONE            MACHINE_TYPE     PREEMPTIBLE  INTERNAL_IP  EXTERNAL_IP    STATUS
hulk              us-central1-c   m1-ultramem-160  true         192.0.2.1                   RUNNING
my-instance       us-central1-c   e2-standard-2                 192.51.100.1  203.224.0.113 RUNNING

To view the internal or external IP address for a specific instance using gcloud compute, use the instances describe sub-command with a --format flag to filter the output. For example:

To view the internal IP for a specific instance, run the following command:

gcloud compute instances describe instance-name \
  --format='get(networkInterfaces[0].networkIP)'

192.51.100.1

To view the external IP for a specific instance, run the following command:

gcloud compute instances describe instance-name \
  --format='get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)'

203.224.0.113

Replace instance-name with the name of the instance whose internal or external IP you want to view.

API

Make a GET request to the instances.get method.

 GET https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/project-id/zones/zone/instances/instance-name

Replace the following:

project-id: The project ID for this query.
zone: The zone for the instance that you want to query.
instance-name: The name of the instance resource to return.

Your response body resembles the following snippet:

{
  ...
  "networkInterfaces": [
    {
      ...
      "networkIP": "192.51.100.1",
      ...
      "accessConfigs": [
        {
          ...
          "name": "external-nat",
          "natIP": "203.224.0.113",
          ...
        }
      ],
      ...
    }
  ],
  ...
}

The following fields contain the required information:

networkIP is the assigned internal IP address.
natIP is the assigned external IP address.