Getting the IP address of the current machine using Java

Question

I am trying to develop a system where there are different nodes that are run on different system or on different ports on the same system.

Now all the nodes create

Answer 1

import java.net.DatagramSocket;
import java.net.InetAddress;

try(final DatagramSocket socket = new DatagramSocket()){
  socket.connect(InetAddress.getByName("8.8.8.8"), 10002);
  ip = socket.getLocalAddress().getHostAddress();
}

This way works well when there are multiple network interfaces. It always returns the preferred outbound IP. The destination 8.8.8.8 is not needed to be reachable.

Connect on a UDP socket has the following effect: it sets the destination for Send/Recv, discards all packets from other addresses, and - which is what we use - transfers the socket into "connected" state, settings its appropriate fields. This includes checking the existence of the route to the destination according to the system's routing table and setting the local endpoint accordingly. The last part seems to be undocumented officially but it looks like an integral trait of Berkeley sockets API (a side effect of UDP "connected" state) that works reliably in both Windows and Linux across versions and distributions.

So, this method will give the local address that would be used to connect to the specified remote host. There is no real connection established, hence the specified remote ip can be unreachable.

Edit:

As @macomgil says, for MacOS you can do this:

Socket socket = new Socket();
socket.connect(new InetSocketAddress("google.com", 80));
System.out.println(socket.getLocalAddress());