matthew-e-brown / watchdog

Keeps track of the user's current public IP address by storing it in a GitHub Gist.

Watchdog

Watchdog is a tool to allow you to keep track of your public IP address by keeping the most up-to-date IP in a GitHub Gist. Knowing the public IP address of one of your machines can be very helpful while you're on the road on another machine. Watchdog lets you do that easily.

My ISP charges extra for static IPs, but I have found keeping the public address accessible online to be a satisfactory alternative. I built this program for myself as an upgrade to a dinky Python script I was using.

Usage

Both the update and fetch commands require an ID of a GitHub Gist to be passed as a positional argument. That may look something like:

$ watchdog fetch 2be930b9e8f00d34619f748efb54def3

You should create your own gist first—simply use a blank or dummy file to start out.

If you would prefer, you can use an environment variable instead:

$ export IP_GIST_ID='2be930b9e8f00d34619f748efb54def3'
$ watchdog fetch -v IP_GIST_ID

This allows you to keep your Gist's ID private should you wish to put a call to watchdog in a file that may be committed somewhere, such as .bashrc or .ssh/config (as I intend to do) in a dot-files repo.

See watchdog --help, watchdog update --help, and watchdog fetch --help for a complete set of options.

Update

Queries https://ipinfo.io for the device's current public IP address and update the given gist with it. This command should be run on a schedule using something like cron or the Windows Task Scheduler.

Extra options

• --force, -f: Update the Gist even if it's most recent address is up-to-date.
• --print, -p: Print the new IP address to stdout after updating the Gist.
• --use-ssh, -s: Use the [e-mail] URL for cloning and pushing the Gist, rather than HTTPS. Because this program simply spawns git directly, you can select a specific SSH key by setting an environnement variable.
• --dry-run, -d: Fetch a new IP address from https://ipinfo.io and print it, without updating any Gist.

Fetch

Run watchdog fetch and pass an ID of a GitHub Gist to query it for the most up-to-date public IP address. This is intended to be used from another computer to get the address of the main computer, such as when you're attempting to establish SSH connection.

Installation

You can also install watchdog with Cargo by using

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/matthew-e-brown/watchdog