If you use a Dynamic DNS setup to reach machines which are not behind a stable IP address, you will likely have a need to probe these machines' public IP addresses. One option is to use an insecure service like Oracle's http://checkip.dyndns.com/ which echoes back your client IP, but you can also do this on your own server if you have one.

There are multiple options to do this, like writing a CGI or PHP script, but those are fairly heavyweight if that's all you need mod_cgi or PHP for. Instead, I decided to use Apache's built-in Server-Side Includes.

Apache configuration

Start by turning on the include filter by adding the following in /etc/apache2/conf-available/ssi.conf:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml

and making that configuration file active:

a2enconf ssi

Then, find the vhost file where you want to enable SSI and add the following options to a Location or Directory section:

<Location /ssi_files>
    Options +IncludesNOEXEC
    SSLRequireSSL
    Header set Content-Security-Policy: "default-src 'none'"
    Header set X-Content-Type-Options: "nosniff"
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
</Location>

before adding the necessary modules:

a2enmod headers
a2enmod include

and restarting Apache:

apache2ctl configtest && systemctl restart apache2.service

Create an shtml page

With the web server ready to process SSI instructions, the following HTML blurb can be used to display the client IP address:

<!--#echo var="REMOTE_ADDR" -->

or any other built-in variable.

Note that you don't need to write a valid HTML for the variable to be substituted and so the above one-liner is all I use on my server.

Security concerns

The first thing to note is that the configuration section uses the IncludesNOEXEC option in order to disable arbitrary command execution via SSI. In addition, you can also make sure that the cgi module is disabled since that's a dependency of the more dangerous side of SSI:

a2dismod cgi

Of course, if you rely on this IP address to be accurate, for example because you'll be putting it in your DNS, then you should make sure that you only serve this page over HTTPS, which can be enforced via the SSLRequireSSL directive.

I included two other headers in the above vhost config (Content-Security-Policy and X-Content-Type-Options) in order to limit the damage that could be done in case a malicious file was accidentally dropped in that directory.

Finally, I suggest making sure that only the root user has writable access to the directory which has server-side includes enabled:

$ ls -la /var/www/ssi_includes/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     root     4096 May 18 15:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 root     root     4096 May 18 15:40 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root        0 May 18 15:46 index.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root       32 May 18 15:58 whatsmyip.shtml