How can I use HAproxy with SSL and get X-Forwarded-For headers AND tell PHP that SSL is in use?
- by Josh
I have the following setup:
(internet) ---> [ pfSense Box ] /-> [ Apache / PHP server ]
[running HAproxy] --+--> [ Apache / PHP server ]
+--> [ Apache / PHP server ]
\-> [ Apache / PHP server ]
For HTTP requests this works great, requests are distributed to my Apache servers just fine. For SSL requests, I had HAproxy distributing the requests using TCP load balancing, and it worked however since HAproxy didn't act as a proxy, it didn't add the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header, and the Apache / PHP servers didn't know the client's real IP address.
So, I added stunnel in front of HAproxy, reading that stunnel could add the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. However, the package which I could install into pfSense does not add this header... also, this apparently kills my ability to use KeepAlive requests, which I would really like to keep. But the biggest issue which killed that idea was that stunnel converted the HTTPS requests into plain HTTP requests, so PHP didn't know that SSL was enabled and tried to redirect to the SSL site.
How can I use HAproxy to load balance across a number of SSL servers, allowing those servers to both know the client's IP address and know that SSL is in use? And if possible, how can I do it on my pfSense server?
Or should I drop all this and just use nginx?
