Visitor IP address not working when using varnish & Cloudflare

Hey; so if you were to try and get the IP via $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] you would instead reach CloudFlare’s servers. So there are two ways around this.

The first is to modify your PHP to look something like this:

if (isset($_SERVER["HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP"])) {
    $ip = $_SERVER["HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP"];
} else {
    $ip = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
}

Then use that IP variable however you please.

The other way is to use Mod_CloudFlare on Apache, or modify your Nginx configuration.

Let me know if you need anything else.

Junade (Community Manager @ CloudFlare)

Hey, icyapril thanks for answering.

I’ve actually updated the plugin code with something like that, but instead I have used the HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR for solving this issue. It worked!

I know, isn’t the best practice to modify the plugin but, in this case, was essential.

Hey;

Just a heads up – the HTTP-X-Forwarded-For header can be overwritten later down the chain; so it can have the IP of an internal relay instead of a CF header; also it can even be a comma separated list.

Thanks