The purpose of this tool is developing a daemon for fetching Raspberry Pi's (or any other Linux distro's) public IP and sending it to a desired email address at a desired time step. After you finish setting up this script, you will be informed at a defined timestep, or at every system boot if the IP address of your machine has changed.
This script is useful for creating a webserver, using VNC outside a local network or being able to SSH to a dynamic IP host. Knowing the public IP of a dynamic IP host has numerous other useful uses.
To install the tool, download the public_ip_hander.py file and place it in a suitable folder, e.g. /home/user/. Then edit the fields: to, gmail_user and gmail_password, to match the email of the recipient and email and password of the sender.
After you have successfully edited the script, in order to execute it write in terminal (replace /home/user/ with your path to file):
python /home/user/public_ip_handler.pyNow, to setup the script to be executed at a desired timestep, we shall use the built-in cron tool.
To open cron editor, write:
crontab -eIf you want to execute the script each day at 12:00, append the fallowing command to the editor:
0 12 * * * python /home/user/public_ip_handler.py
For more crontab options, you can consult the official manual or this quick reference.
To send your Pi's IP at each system boot, you have to edit the hidden ~/.bashrc file. The command to that is:
echo 'python /home/user/public_ip_handler.py' >> ~/.bashrcThe public_ip_hander.py is a modification of the startup_mailer.py script under the "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License".