Pressing the Red Button

Here is a small snippet to get the client’s ip address in your python code in DJANGO. You might have tried the ‘REMOTE_ADDR’ key in the request object but it always returns 127.0.0.1. To fix this, you can use the ‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’ variable like so:

from django.http import HttpRequest

def mypage(request):
	client_address = request.META['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']
	....

The HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR variable stores the client’s ip when the user is going through a proxy or load balancer.

I ran into this issue when running my Django app on apache. All lookups of the ‘REMOTE_ADDR’ return localhost (127.0.0.1). This is probably a side affect of how the python module runs in apache.