Static IP Configuration on Ubuntu 16.04

Introduction

There are two methods to assign network configuration to a device on the net. DHCP or static assignment. DHCP is normally set as default. Static configurations usually need IP addresses as well as DNS resolvers plus routing. In this tutorial, we will cover Linux static configuration on Ubuntu 16.04.

Prerequisites

• Cloud VPS or Dedicated Server with Ubuntu 16.04 installed.
• You must be logged in via SSH as sudo or root user. This tutorial assumes that you are logged in as a sudo user.

Step 1: Log in using SSH

You must be logged in via SSH as sudo or root user. Please read this article for instructions if you don’t know how to connect.

Step 2: Find the active network interface

clear && echo $(ip -o -4 route get 8.8.8.8 | sed -nr 's/.*dev ([^\ ]+).*/\1/p')

Step 3: Configure the network interface

In our example, our network interface is ens18 with the following network details:

IPv4 = 185.62.56.69
Netmask = 255.255.255.0 
Gateway = 185.62.56.1
DNS 89.207.128.252, 89.207.130.252

Our article will use network interface ens18 and the server details described above. Your server details will not be the same as our article and your network interface name can be different then we use in our article. Use the network interface name you get from step 2.

Edit your network configuration file

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

It should be similairto this configuration

auto ens18
iface ens18 inet dhcp

Replace the above two lines to use statc IPv4 instead of DHCP

auto ens18
iface ens18 inet static
 address 185.62.56.69
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 gateway 185.62.56.1
 dns-nameservers 89.207.128.252 89.207.130.252

Apply the changes

sudo systemctl restart networking.service

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have now configured a static IPv4 for your Ubuntu 16.04 Operating System. If you need to configure static IPv6 for your Ubuntu 16.04 use this article.