Random IP Generator

Generating test IP addresses

Sometimes you just need a plausible-looking IP address - or a hundred of them - to feed a test, seed a database or fill out a mockup. Generating them by hand is tedious and you inevitably end up reusing the same few. This tool produces valid random addresses in both of the formats the internet runs on.

IPv4 and IPv6

IPv4 is the original 32-bit scheme: four numbers from 0 to 255 separated by dots, giving about 4.3 billion addresses - a pool that has effectively run out. IPv6 is its 128-bit successor, written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, with so many addresses that exhaustion is not a concern in any realistic future.

IPv4:  203.0.113.42
IPv6:  2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

The reserved ranges

Not every address is a public, routable one. Whole blocks are set aside for special uses and should usually be excluded from random test data: the private ranges 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16; loopback at 127.0.0.0/8; and link-local at 169.254.0.0/16. This generator can skip those reserved ranges so your sample data looks like real public traffic.

What it is good for

Random IPs are handy for seeding test and staging databases, building fixtures for unit tests, load-testing log pipelines, anonymising real logs by substitution, or simply teaching how addressing works. One responsible-use note: a randomly generated address may well belong to a real host somewhere, so use these strictly for local testing and fixtures - never as targets for live traffic, scanning or anything you are not authorised to touch.