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Question

Real client IP from varnish in apache

Hi DO Community,

I have 2 droplet,

serverA - varnish serverB - LAMP (wordpress)

My LAMP show serverA private IP instead of real client IP. How I can get real client IP in this situation?

Thank you.

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Andrew SB • June 16, 2016

In order to have Varnish pass on the real client IP to your Apache access log, you’ll need to edit your Varnish configuration (/etc/varnish/default.vcl on Ubuntu) to add an X-Forwarded-For header. Find the vcl_recv section and added the following:

sub vcl_recv {
  unset req.http.X-Forwarded-For;
  set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;
}

(Note: If you are using Varnish < 4.0 change unset to remove as the syntax is different.)

Than, in your Apache Virtual Host, set a CustomLog format:

LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{User-agent}i\"" varnishcombined
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log varnishcombined

Finally, restart both Apache and Varnish for the changes to take effect:

sudo service varnish restart
sudo service apache2 restart

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