Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

Forwarding the correct IP address

Nowadays, a good portion of websites make use of the visitor's IP address for all kinds of reasons:

• Storing the IP address of a visitor posting a comment on a blog or a discussion forum
• Geo-targeted advertising or other services
• Limiting services to specific IP address ranges

Therefore, it is important for those websites to ensure that the web server correctly receives the IP address of the visitor.

As explained before, since Apache—or more generally, the backend server—uses the IP address of the socket it communicates with, the IP that will appear in our design will always be the IP of the server hosting Nginx. In the previous section, we discovered a possible solution is inserting the proxy_set_header ...