How can I get the IP Address of a local computer?

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The question is trickier than it appears, because in many cases there isn’t “an IP address for the local computer” so much as a number of different IP addresses. For example, the Mac I’m typing on right now (which is a pretty basic, standard Mac setup) has the following IP addresses associated with it:

fe80::1%lo0  
127.0.0.1 
::1 
fe80::21f:5bff:fe3f:1b36%en1 
10.0.0.138 
172.16.175.1
192.168.27.1

… and it’s not just a matter of figuring out which of the above is “the real IP address”, either… they are all “real” and useful; some more useful than others depending on what you are going to use the addresses for.

In my experience often the best way to get “an IP address” for your local computer is not to query the local computer at all, but rather to ask the computer your program is talking to what it sees your computer’s IP address as. e.g. if you are writing a client program, send a message to the server asking the server to send back as data the IP address that your request came from. That way you will know what the relevant IP address is, given the context of the computer you are communicating with.

That said, that trick may not be appropriate for some purposes (e.g. when you’re not communicating with a particular computer) so sometimes you just need to gather the list of all the IP addresses associated with your machine. The best way to do that under Unix/Mac (AFAIK) is by calling getifaddrs() and iterating over the results. Under Windows, try GetAdaptersAddresses() to get similar functionality. For example usages of both, see the GetNetworkInterfaceInfos() function in this file.

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