Change value of request.remote_ip in Ruby on Rails

Question

For test purposes I want to change the return value of request.remote_ip. While being on my development machine it returns always 127.0.0.1 as it should but I would like to give myself different fake IPs to test the correct behavior of my app without deploying it to an live server first!

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can modify the request object using:

request = ActionController::Request.new('REMOTE_ADDR' => '1.2.3.4')

request.remote_ip now returns 1.2.3.4

Answer 2

You can cheat a bit by making a mutator for the remote_ip value in the test environment which is normally not defined.

For instance, alter the class inside of test/test_helper.rb with the following:

class ActionController::TestRequest
  def remote_ip=(value)
    @env['REMOTE_ADDR'] = value.to_s
  end
end

Then, during your testing you can reassign as required:

def test_something
  @request.remote_ip = '1.2.3.4'
end

This can be done either in the individual test, or within your setup routine, wherever is appropriate.

I have had to use this before when writing functional tests that verify IP banning, geolocation, etc.

Answer 3

rails 4.0.1 rc. After hour of searching found this simple solution while digging to code :)

get '/', {}, { 'REMOTE_ADDR' => '1.2.3.4' }

Answer 4

For integration tests, this works with rails 5:

get "/path", params: { }, headers: { "REMOTE_ADDR" => "1.2.3.4" }

Answer 5

What I ended up doing now was to put this code in the end of the config/environments/development.rb file to make sure it's only executed while in development

# fake IP for manuel testing
class ActionController::Request
  def remote_ip
    "1.2.3.4"
  end
end

So this sets remote_ip to 1.2.3.4 when the server starts. Everytime you change the value you have to restart the server!