Get Your Visitors Real IP Addresses with Nginx and CloudFlare
I use CloudFlare for my website, which acts as a reverse proxy. As a result, this causes the visitors’ IP addresses to my site to be logged as CloudFlare’s. Thankfully though CloudFlare includes a CF-Connecting-IP header with the visitor’s real IP address.
It’s quite simple to configure Nginx to log the real IP courtesy of the CF-Connecting-IP header.
Requirements:
- http-real-ip module (Ubuntu loaded by default)
Create a config file for Nginx
nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/cloudflare.conf
Add the following lines to the config file
# Location of file containing CloudFlare IP addresses
include /etc/nginx/cloudflare-ips;
Grab the list of CloudFlare’s latest IP ranges, and add them in the following format:
nano /etc/nginx/cloudflare-ips
# CloudFlare IP addresses
# > IPv4
set_real_ip_from 103.21.244.0/22;
set_real_ip_from 103.22.200.0/22;
set_real_ip_from 103.31.4.0/22;
set_real_ip_from 104.16.0.0/12;
set_real_ip_from 108.162.192.0/18;
set_real_ip_from 131.0.72.0/22;
set_real_ip_from 141.101.64.0/18;
set_real_ip_from 162.158.0.0/15;
set_real_ip_from 172.64.0.0/13;
set_real_ip_from 173.245.48.0/20;
set_real_ip_from 188.114.96.0/20;
set_real_ip_from 190.93.240.0/20;
set_real_ip_from 197.234.240.0/22;
set_real_ip_from 198.41.128.0/17;
# > IPv6
set_real_ip_from 2400:cb00::/32;
set_real_ip_from 2405:8100::/32;
set_real_ip_from 2405:b500::/32;
set_real_ip_from 2606:4700::/32;
set_real_ip_from 2803:f800::/32;
set_real_ip_from 2c0f:f248::/32;
set_real_ip_from 2a06:98c0::/29;
real_ip_header CF-Connecting-IP;
Reload Nginx and from now on you’ll have your visitor’s real IP addresses showing instead of CloudFlares.
service nginx reload