Recover CloudFlare visitor IPs with NGINX

Update your CloudFlare realip list with a simple commandline utility.

Why?

CloudFlare essentially acts as a reverse proxy for your website, meaning requests to your servers served by CloudFlare are in fact coming from CloudFlare's servers not your visitors. This means that in certain situations, such as for your NGINX access logs you'll see CloudFlare's IP addresses instead of your visitors'. This can be problematic for services that rely on visitor's true IP addresses. Particularly if you're relying on a fraud prevention system that requires visitor IPs.

See CloudFlare's support article on the topic for a much better explaination.

This package helps you keep CloudFlare's list or IP addresses updated with a simple command: nginx-cf-realip.

Requirements

• npm v4.6.1 or higher.

Installation

$ npm install -g nginx-cf-realip

Options

$ nginx-cf-realip [options]

Options:
  -V, --version             output the version number
  -d, --destination <path>  Destination path for NGINX realip list. (default: "./cf-realip.conf")
  -h, --header <header>     Header to fetch realip from. (default: "CF-Connecting-IP")
  -h, --help                output usage information

Usage

Create a cf-realip.conf file in the current directory:

$ nginx-cf-realip

You can also define a destination path:

$ nginx-cf-realip -d /etc/nginx   # -d can be either a file or directory path.

Then, include your generated cf-realip.conf file in your NGINX configuration. (Default path: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf)

http {
    # ...
    include /etc/nginx/cf-realip.conf;
    # ...
}

License

This repository is licensed under the ISC license.

Copyright (c) 2019, Jørgen Vatle.