using digitalocean loadbalancer, how to get real ip?

I got my nginx ingress to work by doing these two things:

1. Enable Proxy Protocol in the DO load balancer - https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/load-balancers/#proxy-protocol
2. Modify NGINX config

• Accept Proxy Protocol: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/nginx-configuration/configmap/#use-proxy-protocol
• Set CIDR range: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/nginx-configuration/configmap/#proxy-real-ip-cidr

Hope this helps!

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.

@GrantZvolsky — amazing answer, did the trick for me! The link to blog post is broken though, sadly :) Would love to read it!