How to make view counts work behind a reverse proxy like nginx?

Question

My q2a server is deployed on a different server, receiving requests from an nginx proxy that is on its own server, so the only client IP that q2a sees is the nginx server's IP.  This results in view counts not incrementing.  The requests that come into q2a could have X-Forwarded-For or X-Real-IP headers, but q2a doesn't use them.

Is there a way to configure this, or places in the code I can start looking to make modifications?

Note: I took a look at this question, but I'm not sure if it applies to my case, since my nginx and q2a servers are on different servers w/ different IPs.  Also, assume it's not an option for me to install nginx on the q2a server to do the client IP rewriting,

Comments

What webserver is your q2a running on ?

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Hi @maxjtechno, I'm running apache.  The version info is as follows:

Apache/2.2.22 (Debian) PHP/5.4.4-14+deb7u8

Answer 1

I found a plugin on github that seems to address this.

 

https://github.com/brenard/qa-behind-reverse-proxy-overrides

 

It looks like it just uses an override function to detect the presence of the X-Forwarded-For field and present that as the client IP.

Comments

This is the one we ended up using, since it's local to Q2A and had the minimum risk to other services.

Answer 2

I think you should have mod_rpaf installed on Apache to have the correct REMOTE_ADDRESS value

http://www.boxtricks.com/how-to-set-remote_addr-variable-in-apache2-with-nginx/

http://www.daveperrett.com/articles/2009/08/10/passing-ips-to-apache-with-nginx-proxy/

Comments

Thanks @maxjtechno.  This is the best answer for cases where it's preferred to make the changes to the web server (which is arguably the "right" place for this problem).  In my case though, I'm looking to minimize changes outside of Q2A.