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 your IP address through either the
Google Cloud Console, the
gcloud
command-line tool, or the
Compute Engine API.
Console
To view the internal and external IP addresses for your instance, go to the VM instances page.

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 n1-ultramem-160 true 192.0.2.1 RUNNING my-instance us-central1-c n1-standard-1 192.51.100.1 203.224.0.113 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
where [INSTANCE_NAME]
is the name of the instance whose internal or
external IP you want to view.
API
Make a GET
request to the instances.get
method.
https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/[PROJECT_ID]/zones/[ZONE]/instances/[INSTANCE_NAME]
where:
[ZONE]
is the name of the region for this request.[PROJECT_ID]
is the project ID for this request.[INSTANCE_NAME]
is 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.