In this article, you'll learn how to get a website visitor's IP address in ASP.NET using two different methods.
What is an IP Address?
According to Wikipedia, An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.”
There are two versions of the IP address. The first version is an IPv4 that contains an IP address as a 32-bit number. The newer version is developed as IPv6, which takes a 128-bit number to store an IP Address.
There are two common ways to get the IP Address of a visitor of a website.
First Method to get IP address in ASP.NET
The first method of getting an IP Address is using “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR” and “REMOTE_ADDR”. Where, “X_FORWARDED_FOR” is the HTTP header field for identifying originating IP Address of the client who is connected to Internet and “REMOTE_ADDR” returns the IP address of the remote machine.
Code to get IP Address using Method 1:
private void GetIpValue(out string ipAdd)
{
ipAdd = Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"];
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ipAdd))
{
ipAdd = Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"];
}
else
{
lblIPAddress.Text = ipAdd;
}
}
Second Method to get IP Address
The second method of getting an IP address is using a built-in functionality of ASP.NET. Here we use the Request property of the Page class, which gets an object of HttpRequest class for the requested page. The HttpRequest is a sealed class that enables ASP.NET to read the HTTP values sent by the client browser during a Web request. We access the UserHostAddress property of HttpRequest class to get the IP Address of the visitor.
Code to get IP Address using Method 2:
private void GetIpAddress(out string userip)
{
userip = Request.UserHostAddress;
if (Request.UserHostAddress != null)
{
Int64 macinfo = new Int64();
string macSrc = macinfo.ToString("X");
if (macSrc == "0")
{
if (userip == "127.0.0.1")
{
Response.Write("visited Localhost!");
}
else
{
lblIPAdd.Text = userip;
}
}
}
}
Default.aspx
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Get IP Address</title>
<link href="Files/css/bootstrap.css" rel="stylesheet" />
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<h1><strong>Your IP Address : </strong></h1>
<br/>
<h1><strong>Method 1 : </strong><asp:Label ID="lblIPAddress" CssClass="label label-primary" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label></h1>
<br />
<h1><strong>Method 2 : </strong><asp:Label ID="lblIPAdd" CssClass="label label-info" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label></h1>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Call above methods in Page_Load event, as soon as the page loads you will get an output like this.
![ip address in ASP.Net]()
Conclusion
These are two methods to get the IP address of a client. In this article, we learned how to get the IP address of a website visitor using ASP.NET and C#.
You can get more about a visitors, its browser and other details. Learn more here: Get Client IP Address In ASP.NET MVC