How to Get Basic Info About Your Linux Server

April 15, 2023

I always forget these commands… so here is my list of helpful commands to get information about your server.

  • Get your external IP address.
Terminal window
curl ifconfig.io
  • Get your internal IP address. For example, this can be helpful if you are working with several EC2 instances that need to communicate with each other. You can use this instead of the external IP address for node to node communication. This has the benefit of being static even if you stop and start your EC2 instance.
Terminal window
hostname -i
  • Get information about your operating system.
Terminal window
lsb_release -a
  • Get information about your current operating system when in a Docker image.
Terminal window
cat /etc/os-release