This IP - See Every Site's IP Instantly!

A short story about my life as a DevOps engineer

It's 2:47 PM. I'm staring at a staging environment that swears it's pointing to the new load balancer. The DNS change was made an hour ago. TTL was 300 seconds. Math says we're good.

Here's the fun part: like most DevOps setups, we live in two DNS worlds. Out on the internet, names resolve through public resolvers like Google DNS (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) — fast, reliable, boring in the best way. But inside our dev environment, we run our own DNS stack: a self-hosted PowerDNS Authoritative Server holding the internal zones (the reason staging.example.internal exists at all), fronted by a PowerDNS Recursor that every client points to. The Recursor forwards internal zones to our authoritative server and sends everything else upstream to the public resolvers. Elegant on the whiteboard. In practice: the same hostname can resolve to two completely different IPs depending on which resolver your machine is actually talking to.

So I open the site in my browser. Looks... fine? Maybe? Is this the new server? Am I hitting the internal record or did my laptop quietly fall back to public DNS? Is my browser serving me cached lies again?

Alt-tab to terminal.

dig staging.example.com +short          # what Cloudflare thinks
dig @10.0.0.53 staging.example.com +short  # internal DNS thinks

Two answers. Cool. But what did my browser actually connect to? Alt-tab back. Open DevTools. Network tab. Click a request. Squint at "Remote Address".

I did this dance roughly 36 times an hour for hundred sites. Multiply by CDN checks, blue-green cutovers, "is it DNS?" incidents (it's always DNS), and that one DNS record someone edited without telling anyone — and I realized I'd spent a measurable percentage of my career manually asking the question: "What IP am I actually talking to right now?"

So I built a thing...

Meet This IP 👋

This IP is a minimal browser extension that resolves and displays the IP address of every website you visit — in a small, glassy floating badge in the corner of your screen. No terminal. No DevTools spelunking. No alt-tab cardio.

You browse. The IP is just... there. Like it should have been all along.

🔗 Homepage: nh4ttruong.github.io/thisip

Free, open source, no account required. Because the last thing anyone needs is a login screen between them and an IP address.

Features - Everything you need, nothing you don't

🏷️ Floating Badge

A subtle glass morphism badge appears on every page showing the site's resolved IP. It's pretty enough that you won't want to hide it, and small enough that you can.

🔀 Dual Stack (IPv4 & IPv6)

Resolves both IPv4 and IPv6 automatically using DNS-over-HTTPS. Yes, it knows about IPv6. Yes, even if your office network pretends it doesn't exist.

📋 One-Click Copy

Click the badge → IP is on your clipboard. Ready to paste into your firewall rule, Slack incident thread, or that "is it DNS?" ticket. It also toggles the badge's position, in case it's sitting on top of something important.

🔄 Auto Refresh

IPs are re-resolved periodically in the background. When your CDN or load balancer rotates addresses mid-session, you'll actually see it — instead of finding out three coffees later.

⚙️ Customizable

Toggle the icon and IP tag visibility from the popup settings. Minimalism, but make it configurable.

🔒 Privacy First

Minimal permissions. No analytics. No tracking. Your browsing data never leaves your machine. The extension does one job, and spying on you isn't it.

How it works

1. Install — grab it from the Edge Add-ons store or load it manually in Developer Mode.

2. Browse — visit any website; the extension resolves its IP in the background.

3. See & copy — the badge appears with the IP. Click to copy. That's the whole tutorial.

If your onboarding docs were this short, nobody would skip them.

Browser support

Install it

Microsoft Edge

One click from the official store: 👉 Install for Edge — Microsoft Edge Add-ons

Chrome & Brave (Developer Mode)

1. Download the latest release from GitHub Releases

2. Open chrome://extensions (or brave://extensions)

3. Flip on Developer Mode

4. Hit Load unpacked and point it at the extracted folder

5. Pin the icon so the settings are one click away

Takes under a minute - less time than it takes your DNS change to propagate. 😌

Who is this for?

• 🧑‍💻 DevOps / SRE / System Engineer — verify DNS cutovers, confirm you're hitting the right CDN edge, and finally answer "is it DNS?" at a glance

• 🛡️ Security folks — instantly grab the destination IP for threat intel lookups and firewall correlation

• 🌐 Web developers — sanity-check staging vs. production without opening DevTools

• 🤓 Anyone curious — ever wondered where a website actually lives? Now you know. Always.

Open source, free forever

This IP is released under the MIT License. Use it, fork it, break it, fix it:

• ⭐ Star it on GitHub (stars keep DevOps engineers alive, this is science)

• 🐛 Report an issue

• 🤝 Contribute

Your terminal will still be there for the fancy stuff. But for the 36-times-an-hour question of "what IP is this?" — there's now a badge for that. 🚀

Made by @nh4ttruong · MIT License