Openshift redirect service to https loses users IP address

Question

Hi Iam redirecting all my traffic to https as suggested in the Knowledge Base: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/kb/kb-e1044-how-to-redirect-traffic-to-https

However after doing this Iam unable to get the users ip address and instead get the ip address of the Server which is redirecting:

Below is an example of a Java spring MVC specific implementation. The currentViewedIP becomes is the servers which did the redirected to HTTPS rather than the users IP.

 @RequestMapping(value = "/payment/", method = RequestMethod.GET)
  public String newBracqet(Model model, HttpServletRequest request) {
    String currentViewedIP = request.getRemoteAddr();
 }

Answer 1

If user is behind a proxy server or access your web server through a load balancer (for example, in cloud hosting), the above code will get the IP address of the proxy server or load balancer server, not the original IP address of a client.

To solve it, you should get the IP address of the request’s HTTP header “X-Forwarded-For (XFF)“.

  //is client behind something?
  String ipAddress = request.getHeader("X-FORWARDED-FOR");  
  if (ipAddress == null) {  
     ipAddress = request.getRemoteAddr();  
  }