Set up your own what is my ip service with just nginx
- 16 Jul 2017: Post was created (diff)
How not to do it with nginx
I wanted to host my own What is my ip service. At first I made a Node.js web server which returned the remote address of the request.
const app = express()
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.send(`Your IP address is: ${res.locals.clientip}`)
})
However, while reading the list of variables portion of the nginx documentation, it occured to me how overkill my Node.js solution was, especially since I was already proxying the requests to the Node.js HTTP server via nginx.
The good way
The $remote_addr variable can simply be returned with the return directive:
return 200 $remote_addr\n;
Also appending a newline at the end there. Below is the nginx configuration I use for serving ip.stigok.com
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
listen 443 ssl http2;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
server_name ip.stigok.com;
ssl_certificate /letsencrypt/live/ip.stigok.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /letsencrypt/live/ip.stigok.com/privkey.pem;
keepalive_requests 0;
location / {
default_type text/plain;
return 200 $remote_addr\n;
}
}
The service returns something similar to this
$ curl -i https://ip.stigok.com
HTTP/2 200
server: nginx
date: Fri, 24 Nov 2017 01:16:22 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
content-length: 13
x-number: 42
127.13.37.1
If you have any comments or feedback, please send me an e-mail. (stig at stigok dotcom).
Did you find any typos, incorrect information, or have something to add? Then please propose a change to this post.