Request's IP address using django, Apache proxying through Nginx.

So I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out how to get the real IP address from the request objects when proxying through Nginx using Apache. I didn't find much documentation online about this topic so I figured that I should share.

Problem:
So you do something like this:

Class MyModel(models.Model):
 ...
 def populate_meta(self, meta_data):
     try:
         if 'REMOTE_ADDR' in meta_data:
             self.ip = meta_data['REMOTE_ADDR']
     except KeyError:
             pass

And you ./manage.py runserver and all works well, your IP addresses are recorded fine.

Then you set-up a production server with Nginx and Apache with a configuration that looks like this:

server {
  listen   80;
  server_name example.com;
  location / {
           proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:81;
           proxy_redirect  off;
           proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
           proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
           proxy_set_header    X-Magic-Header "secret";
           client_max_body_size       10m;
               proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  }
  location /static {
       alias /srv/web/landing/landing/static/;
  }
  location /media {
      alias /srv/web/landing/env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/;
  }
}

And then suddenly all the IP addresses are recorded as 127.0.0.1!

How to fix it:
Change your python code to the following:

Class MyModel(models.Model):
 ...
 def populate_meta(self, meta_data):
     try:
         if 'HTTP_X_REAL_IP' in meta_data:
             self.ip = meta_data['HTTP_X_REAL_IP']
     except KeyError:
             pass

That's it! Hope it helps.