For mail to arrive in the right recipient's mailbox, the exact address, including country, city, zip code, and street must be specified. This way, the post office and its employees know where the mail should be sent and how to route it. The same is true on the Internet: any device connected requires an address to communicate with other devices. This address is known as the IP address.
Thus all visitors who visit your website are identified by their IP address, which is mandatory for the exchange of data, but can also serve several other purposes.
As a general rule, a website does not have to worry about its hosting infrastructure. And yet, there is a special case for which a web developer must understand the network environment around the server machine: when it is necessary to retrieve its visitors' IP address.
The task seems simple since the webserver knows its visitors' IP addresses, which can be retrieved from one of its variables. And yet, there are complications. If you're not developer or just want to get personal information, you can use our tool to find out what is your IP address and location.
What can I do with a visitor's IP address?
Web servers automatically record the activity of your visitors by identifying them by their IP address. These activities can be found in the server's log files, which are extremely useful to understand their behavior on your site and to optimize its structure and the content of your pages.
But IP addresses also make it possible to identify with some precision the geographical position of your visitors. This is called geolocation.
What if most of your visitors are coming from a non-English speaking country while your site is entirely in English? Geolocation allows you to detect such a situation and know which country your visitors are coming from. With such information, you can decide to translate your site, offer these visitors content in their language, or use backlink management tools to to review your linking profile and improve your SEO and ranking to get better natural traffic.
A simple method to retrieve the IP address using Ruby on Rails
The request object available in Rails controllers exposes many helpful methods to get information about the client's request (the visitor of your site). You can use the request.ip method to get the IP address of the visitor (which returns the client's IP address) and we will observe some peculiarities:
class HomeController < ApplicationController
def index
render plain: "You IP address is #{client_ip}"
end
private def client_ip
request.ip
end
end
For example, if your website is behind a reverse proxy, every call to request.ip will return the proxy's IP address, not the visitor's.
Obviously, if you run this code on your local machine, and depending on its configuration, the page will display "Your IP address is 127.0.0.1" or "Your IP address is ::1". The first case corresponds to a IPv4 address, and the second to a IPv6 address. The two addresses have in common that they are both a loopback addresses, which are used by any computer to connect to itself.
To get a more interesting result, you have to deploy your code on a public server at a hosting company. Once this is done, get your real public IP address using a third party service as a reference. You can find such a service on Google. Then access your site to compare the results. If everything went well, your script would show you the same IP address as the one given by the third party service.
Why is it necessary to know the infrastructure of your hosting provider?
As a web developer, you may have already heard of load-balancer, DDoS mitigator, or more simply proxy or firewall. You may not have bothered until now to understand how they work. But to get the IP address of your visitors, you will need to understand some of the basic mechanisms.
A proxy or firewall is positioned between your web server and your visitor. Its role is to protect your web server, which is certainly configured only to accept connections that have been filtered by the proxy.
In this case, you will have to use the remote_ip method. request.remote_ip checks all IPs present in the HTTP header, looking for fields generally used by firewalls, load balancers, or proxies, such as HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR.
How to know if the visitor connects through a VPN using Ruby on Rails
Abstract provides such a service for free through the geolocation API.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between request.ip and request.remote_ip in Rails?
request.ip returns the raw IP address of the incoming TCP connection, while request.remote_ip is smarter: it checks HTTP headers like HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR to find the real client IP when a proxy, load balancer, or firewall sits between the visitor and your server.
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