Get client public ip on apache server used behind load balancer

DigitialOcean Load Balancers set the X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Proto, and X-Forwarded-Port headers to give backend nodes information about the original request. For the original client’s IP address to appear in your logs, you’ll need to make a few configuration changes.

First, make sure that mod_remoteip is enabled. On an Ubuntu or Debian instance, you can do this with:

sudo a2enmod remoteip

Next, there are two changes that you will need to make to your Apache configuration (located at /etc/apache2/apache2.conf on Ubuntu and Debian). You’ll need to add this line:

RemoteIPHeader X-Forwarded-For

As well as make an edit to the LogFormat line that matches the one used in your virtual host. By default that is the combined format. It would look like this in your virtual host config:

        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

Find the matching LogFormat line in your Apache conf and change:

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

to:

LogFormat "%a %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

This tells Apache to log the client IP as recorded by mod_remoteip (%a) rather than hostname (%h). For a full explanation of all the options, see the Apache docs here.

For more information on configuring custom logging directives in Apache, check out:

• How To Configure Logging And Log Rotation In Apache

Will this work with LB configured for ssl passtrough?