How To Use Ipinfo.io In Node.js And Express (and Heroku) Application Properly

I want to block users from some specific countries, and found that ipinfo.io serves the purpose. But when I tried to use it in my Node.js and Express application, it looks like it

Solution 1:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing says:

"X-Forwarded-For: the originating IP address of the client connecting to the Heroku router"

So use:

req.headers['x-forwarded-for']

instead of

req.ip

If you use req.ip, you are "asking" ipinfo.io about the IP of the router.

Solution 2:

It looks like you're behind a proxy, and you're passing an internal IP address to ipinfo.io. You should enable the "trust proxy" setting so that express pulls the correct IP from the X-Forwarded-For header, eg:

app.enable('trust proxy')

And then you can use req.ip will correctly return the client's IP. You probably shouldn't use req.headers['x-forwarded-for'] directly because that could contain a list of IPs.

More details are available at http://expressjs.com/guide.html#proxies