django-ipware

django-ipware is a small Django utility that determines a client’s IP address from an incoming request, handling the mess of X-Forwarded-For headers, proxy chains, and other request metadata that make naive request.META['REMOTE_ADDR'] lookups unreliable behind load balancers and CDNs. Since version 6.0.0 it’s a thin Django wrapper around the framework-agnostic python-ipware package.

It exposes a single get_client_ip(request) function that returns both the detected IP and whether it’s publicly routable, plus configurable options like trusted_proxies_ips and proxy_count for teams that need to guard against IP spoofing in security-sensitive contexts such as authentication or anti-fraud logic.

What You Get

• get_client_ip(request) returning both the detected IP address and a is_routable flag
• Configurable IPWARE_META_PRECEDENCE_ORDER setting to control which request headers are checked and in what order
• trusted_proxies_ips and proxy_count options for hardening IP detection against spoofing in proxy chains
• A thin, Django-specific wrapper around the framework-agnostic python-ipware package for teams that want the same logic outside Django
• Zero-configuration default behavior that works out of the box for common deployment setups

Common Use Cases

• Logging or rate-limiting requests by client IP address in a Django application
• Geolocating users or personalizing content based on client IP in views or middleware
• Feeding IP address into authentication, anti-fraud, or abuse-detection logic behind a load balancer or CDN
• Auditing and access logs that need the real client IP rather than a proxy’s address

Under The Hood

Architecture: The package is intentionally minimal — ipware/ip.py (33 lines) delegates the actual header-parsing and precedence logic to the underlying python-ipware library, while apps.py provides the Django app config so the package integrates as a standard installed app.

Tech Stack: Pure Python with a single runtime dependency on python-ipware for the core IP-resolution algorithm; no database migrations or models are required since the package only reads request metadata.

Code Quality: Tests live in ipware/tests/tests_ip.py against a dedicated testsettings.py Django settings module, exercising the various header-precedence and proxy-count scenarios; coverage reporting is wired up per the README badges.

API Design: The public surface is a single function, get_client_ip(request), returning an (ip, is_routable) tuple — about as low-friction as a Django utility can get, with advanced configuration available via settings rather than complicating the function signature.