Wrong IP-Address with nginx + Unicorn + rails

Question

I check the ip-address in the controller with

request.env['REMOTE_ADDR']

this works fine in my test environment. But on the production server with nginx + unicorn I always get 127.0.0.1.

This is my nginx config for the site:

  upstream unicorn {
  server unix:/tmp/unicorn.urlshorter.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen 80 default deferred;
  # server_name example.com;
  root /home/deployer/apps/urlshorter/current/public;

  location ^~ /assets/ {
    gzip_static on;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
  }

  try_files $uri/index.html $uri @unicorn;
  location @unicorn {
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_pass http://unicorn;
  }

  error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
  client_max_body_size 4G;
  keepalive_timeout 10;
}

Answer 1

The answer is in your config file :) The following should do what you want:

real_ip = request.headers["X-Real-IP"]

more here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Request.html#method-i-headers

UPDATE: The proper answer is here in another Q:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4465588

or in this thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/15883610

spoiler:

use request.remote_ip

Answer 2

I had trouble with this too; I found this question, but the other answer didn't help me.

I looked at Rails 3.2.8's implementation of Rack::Request#ip to see how it decided what to say; to get it to use an address passed via the environment without filtering out addresses from my local network (it's trying to filter out intermediate proxies, but that's not what I wanted), I had to set the HTTP_CLIENT_IP from my nginx proxy configuration block in addition to what you've got above (X-Forwarded-For has to be there too for this to work!):

proxy_set_header CLIENT_IP $remote_addr;

Answer 3

If you use request.remote_addr you'll get the of your Nginx proxy.

To get the real IP address of your user, you can use request.remote_ip.

According to Rails' source code, it checks for various http headers to give you the most relevant one : in Rails 3.2 or Rails 4.0.0.beta1