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Proper Reporting of End User Public IP Address (NGINX-based Ingress controller)

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Wallarm’s version of the Kubernetes Ingress controller is based on the community-supported NGINX Ingress controller for Kubernetes, so the majority of recommendations found in the official Ingress controller documentation and on the public Internet are also applicable to Wallarm’s Ingress controller.

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By default, the Ingress controller assumes that it is directly exposed to the Internet and that the IP addresses of connecting clients are their actual IPs. When passing client requests to upstream services, the controller will automatically add the HTTP request header X-FORWARDED-FOR, which contains the IP addresses of connecting clients.

In situations when a controller is placed behind a load balancer (for example, AWS ELB or Google Network Load Balancer) there are two ways for the Ingress controller to report proper end user IP addresses. These ways are provided below.

Enable Passing the Real Client IP on the Network Layer

This feature is highly dependent on the cloud platform being used; in majority of cases it can be activated by setting the values.yaml file attribute controller.service.externalTrafficPolicy to the value Local by using the --set CLI option:

helm install --set controller.service.externalTrafficPolicy=Local <INGRESS_CONTROLLER_NAME> ingress-chart/wallarm-ingress -n <KUBERNETES_NAMESPACE>

There are also other parameters required for correct Ingress controller installation. Please pass them in the --set option too.

helm upgrade --reuse-values --set controller.service.externalTrafficPolicy=Local <INGRESS_CONTROLLER_NAME> ingress-chart/wallarm-ingress -n <KUBERNETES_NAMESPACE>

Enable Ingress Controller to Take the Value from the X-FORWARDED-FOR HTTP Request Header

This option is more relevant when a customer is using an external CDN service like Cloudflare or Fastly. To set up:

  1. Make sure that the load balancer is passing the real client IP in an HTTP request header with the name X-FORWARDED-FOR.

  2. Set the controller.config.use-forwarded-headers attribute of the Helm chart to true:

    helm install --set controller.config.use-forwarded-headers=true <INGRESS_CONTROLLER_NAME> ingress-chart/wallarm-ingress -n <KUBERNETES_NAMESPACE>

    There are also other parameters required for correct Ingress controller installation. Please pass them in the --set option too.

    helm upgrade --reuse-values --set controller.config.use-forwarded-headers=true <INGRESS_CONTROLLER_NAME> ingress-chart/wallarm-ingress -n <KUBERNETES_NAMESPACE>