How to get Heroku app's IP address

Question

I am running a Heroku app. I am supposed to answer the question "what is your server IP address" by some customer. I am used to figuring out the IP addresses through pinging my domains.

With Heroku, I have two issues here:

1. When I ping my custom domain the IP address I get is different from when I ping the original app domain.

2. The ping does not go through.

Examples:

myhost:~ 1111$ ping fstrk.herokuapp.com
PING us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com (23.23.207.27): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
^C
--- us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss


myhost:~ 1111$ ping dashboard.fstrk.io
PING dashboard.fstrk.io.herokudns.com (54.243.243.251): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3
^C
--- dashboard.fstrk.io.herokudns.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss

I have poor knowledge of networking so I am probably doing this wrong. What is the correct way to obtain the current IP address, and why are they different although they point at the same app?

Answer 1

Is your customer looking to whitelist your IP address in a firewall? If so you might need to setup your Heroku app with a static IP address. Heroku is by design a load balanced system. Depending on traffic, load, etc. you might not be running your app from the same IP address everytime. If you do need a static IP for your app, check out below:

Proximo

Depending on the configuration of your Heroku App you can use Proximo to set a dedicated IP address for your app. Otherwise your app is running on a shared system and there is no guaranteed way to have an ip address.