Send a push notification when your external IP address changes

I need to know when my external IP address changes. Whenever it changes, I need to update an IP whitelist and need to re-login to a few sites. I sometimes don’t notice for a couple of days and, during that time, some automatic processes fail.

After the last time this happened, I whipped up a script that sends me a push notification when my IP address changes.

The script uses Pushover to send the push notification. Pushover is great. I have used it for years to get notifications from my headless computers. If you use the below script, replace ${PUSHOVER_TOKEN} and ${PUSHOVER_USER} with your own details.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

previous_file="${HOME}/.previous-external-ip"

if [ ! -e "${previous_file}" ]; then
    dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com > "${previous_file}"
fi

current_ip=$(dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com)

previous_ip=$(cat "${previous_file}")

if [ "${current_ip}" != "${previous_ip}" ]; then
    echo "external ip changed"
    curl -s --form-string "token=${PUSHOVER_TOKEN}" \
         --form-string "user=${PUSHOVER_USER}" \
         --form-string "title=External IP address changed" \
         --form-string "message='${previous_ip}' => '${current_ip}'" \
         https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json
fi

echo "${current_ip}" > "${previous_file}"

Jake McCrary

Send a push notification when your external IP address changes

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