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:
- Install or update to the latest version of the gcloud command-line tool.
- 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.

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.