PHP Curl, retrieving Server IP Address

Question

I\'m using PHP CURL to send a request to a server. What do I need to do so the response from server will include that server\'s IP address?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to get that IP address directly from curl.
But something like this could do the trick :

First, do the curl request, and use curl_getinfo to get the "real" URL that has been fetched -- this is because the first URL can redirect to another one, and you want the final one :

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.google.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
$real_url = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
curl_close($ch);
var_dump($real_url);    // http://www.google.fr/

Then, use parse_url to extract the "host" part from that final URL :

$host = parse_url($real_url, PHP_URL_HOST);
var_dump($host);        // www.google.fr

And, finally, use gethostbyname to get the IP address that correspond to that host :

$ip = gethostbyname($host);
var_dump($ip);          // 209.85.227.99

Well...
That's a solution ^^ It should work in most cases, I suppose -- though I'm not sure you would always get the "correct" result if there is some kind of load-balancing mecanism...