I’ve got a simple version of my app up and running and I want to log the IP of clients making requests to my service. My problem is that c.ClientIP()(gins method for getting the clients IP) is always logging 127.0.0.1. So I’m just getting the loopback address for all my requests.
I do not believe this is a problem in the app itself, but is an issue with how traffic is forwarded to my app. I am not 100% sure though.
Any advice would be appreciated and I can clarify anything if needed.
ClientIP implements one best effort algorithm to return the real client IP. It called c.RemoteIP() under the hood, to check if the remote IP is a trusted proxy or not. If it is it will then try to parse the headers defined in Engine.RemoteIPHeaders (defaulting to [X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-Ip]). If the headers are not syntactically valid OR the remote IP does not correspond to a trusted proxy, the remote IP (coming form Request.RemoteAddr) is returned.
It seems possible that the result you’re getting may be caught up in the logic implemented in ClientIP. Can you confirm if referencing the X-Forwarded-For header is resulting in the correct IP?
Thanks for the response I gave that a try but X-Forwarded-For isn’t providing the real client IP. It appears to provide only the proxies that the request was forwarded through, hard to be sure. But I can confirm that none of them are my personal IP.
The answer, in my case, is to read the CF-Connecting-IP header. I believe all render services are behind CloudFlare by default? CloudFlares docs say this is the real connecting IP and I confirmed that it’s value matched what I was expecting.
That same documentation indicates that the real client IP should be the first entry in X-Forwarded-For but for whatever reason I’m not seeing it there.
So for anyone seeing this in the future c.Request.Header.Get("CF-Connecting-IP") should give you the real client ip. At least that’s what I’m seeing.