How to find your Mac's IP address

How to find your Mac's IP address

Need to know your Mac's IP address? You've come to the right place. We show how to find this information, as well as explaining what an IP address is and the difference between internal and external IP addresses. Your IP address is your computer or device's location online where the internet can find you, essentially. Networking hardware needs to know this address in order to connect you to the internet, but it does this automatically, and it's quite rare that you'll need to know your IP address yourself. There are two kinds of IP address. If someone refers to your IP address they probably mean the externalone,but we'll show how to find out both in this article. The method you use here depends on whether you're connected to a router, or directly to a modem. 1. Open System Preferences. (Either click the cogs icon in your dock, or hit the Apple logo dropdown menu at the top left of your screen, and then select System Preferences.) 2. Click Network (under the Internet & Wireless section). 3. Highlight the option in the lefthand bar that has a green dot, thencheck the information that appears in the pane on the right. It should say Connected at the top; in the smaller text underneath it will tell you whatyour IP address is. In this case the above method will yield your internal IP address instead, and finding the external address is trickier. In this case we recommend using a service like The IP address we discovered using the above method is the external IP address, and that will nearly always be what you need to find out. But very occasionally you'll need to know your internal IP address instead. 1. Open System Preferences. (Either click the cogs icon in your dock, or hit the Apple logo dropdown menu at the top left of your screen, and then select System Preferences.) 2. Click Network (under the Internet & Wireless section). 3. Check in the lefthand bar to see how you're connected. It'll have a green dot next to it; any failed connections will have a red dot. 4. Make sure you have the green option highlighted, and check the information that appears in the pane on the right. It should say Connected at the top; underneath it willtell you your IP address, in the format XXX.XXX.X.X, almost certainly beginning 192.168.X.X. In the screenshot below,we've highlighted the internal IP address. Note that a different IP address is given for the routertwo rows below: every device on your network, including the router, will be assigned an internal IP address, but the entire network will be assigned a single external IP address at the point it meets the internet. That's it! You now know what your IP address is. Perhaps you would now like to .