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I have an nginx instance set up behind multiple load balancing proxies, and I am using real_ip to get the clients IP address in remote_addr for processing by my Python application.

However in my logs I would like to log the proxy server that actually made the request, but $remote_addr has now been overwritten, and I can't find anything that says a copy of it is made.

How would I be able to accomplish this?

X-Istence
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3 Answers3

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Your setup may have changed since you posted this question, but I had the same problem and there is finally a solution available. I'll post it here in case Google brings someone else to this page.

As @Michael Hampton♦ indicates in his answer to my own version of this question, nginx has added the variable $realip_remote_addr to the Real_IP module. It holds the original value of $remote_addr, allowing you to use/log both the originating client's IP and the IP of the server that sent the actual request to nginx. This was added to version 1.9.7, as of November 2015.

Community
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michaelg
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Don't really get if you want to log at nginx side or inside your application?

For nginx side you can use $http_x_forwarded_for in nginx log_format definition, something like this:

log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] [$msec] '
                '[$request_time] "$request" $status $body_bytes_sent '
                '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
pevik
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Andrei Mikhaltsov
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The module itself seams to not support that. However, reverse proxies (for which real_ip is mostly used) may provide a HTTP header field containing the proxies IP address.

Unfortunately, you cannot check whether the address has been rewritten or not, so a client not connecting through a real_ip-enabled proxy could forge the header field.

Check your proxy's doc, maybe you can use a HTTP header field for the IP address.

Lukas
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