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My Thoughts, Trials and Adventures

'Know Your IP Address' with React

Posted at — Mar 21, 2020 | Last Modified on — May 11, 2023

Demo | Code

This is a quick primer on how to make a ‘Know Your IP’ page with React.

To follow through this, you will need to install node, and create a new project using create-react-app.This tutorial only deals with creating Know Your IP Address Component.


Prerequisites

  1. public-ip module
  2. Working knowledge with React and ES6 Javascript.

Start by making a default skeleton component.


import React from 'react';
const publicIp = require('public-ip');


    render(){

        return <div>
            
            <h1>Hello World!</h1>
        </div>

    }

}

export default MyIp;

Make sure this is working, when you visit the component, it should display “Hello World!”


Create a constructor for our class.

constructor(props){
        super(props)
        this.state = {'ipv4': '0.0.0.0', 'ok': false}
    }

Here, I initiate a React state with 2 value pairs.

  • 'ipv4': '0.0.0.0' - Placeholder that we update after retriving user’s ip.
  • 'ok': false - This will be set to True if user’s ip is sucessfully retrived.

These are some helper functions the retrieve and update IP in the state:

   async get_ip_user_ipv4(){
        let ip = await publicIp.v4();
        return ip
}


    async set_ip(){
        
        var curr_ip_ipv4;

        try{

            curr_ip_ipv4 = await this.get_ip_user_ipv4();
            
           }catch(err){ console.log(err); curr_ip_ipv4=undefined; }

        if (!(curr_ip_ipv4 === undefined)){
        this.setState({'ipv4': curr_ip_ipv4})
        this.setState({'ok': true})
     }

        console.log(this.state.ipv4);
 }

set_ip() is the entry point. It will further call get_ip_user_ipv4() to get IP address of the user.It will then update ipv4 state with retrieved IP and set ok state to True


render(){

        return <div>
            
            {this.state.ok ? 
            <div className="alert alert-primary" role="alert">
                <h3>Your IP: {this.state.ipv4}</h3>
                </div>: null}
            <button className="btn btn-success" onClick={() => this.set_ip()}>Get IP!</button>
        </div>

}

first, we check whether state.ok is set to True, This means we only want it to render if it is set to true or else return null. I used Bootstrap alert to make it look good, this is is optional.

in Button we use onClick prop to invoke our function that retrieves and displays user IP on screen.