Question

Get the real ip of the user

I set up a pod of nginx and php on k8s, I want to get the ip of the user of the browser website, but I only get Private IP


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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August 15, 2022
Accepted Answer

Hello,

There has been a similar question here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/using-digitalocean-loadbalancer-how-to-get-real-ip

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. Though you’ll need to ensure that you web server or application is configured to log that.

For example, if you were using Nginx, you could capture the original IP for a request by configuring a custom log_format directive and using it in your access_log directive. On Ubuntu, you would need to edit the main Nginx config located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf Here’s a very simple example as a proof of concept:

        log_format from-lb 'Original IP: $http_x_forwarded_for';
        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log from-lb;

Of course, you’ll likely want to log more information than that. Here’s a more detailed log format that matches the default output but replaces uses the origin IP address:

        log_format main '$http_x_forwarded_for - $remote_user [$time_local] '
                        '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                        '"$http_user_agent"' ;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;

If you’re using Nginx, you can find more details about configuring logging in this tutorial. If you aren’t, let us know what web server you’re using, and we can help more.

Best,

Bobby

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