Solution: trusted_proxies

This is no problem, but you do need to tell Symfony that this is happening and which reverse proxy IP addresses will be doing this type of thing:

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# app/config/config.yml
# ...
framework:
    trusted_proxies:  [192.0.0.1, 10.0.0.0/8]

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<!-- app/config/config.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:framework="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/symfony"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd
                        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/symfony http://symfony.com/schema/dic/symfony/symfony-1.0.xsd">

    <framework:config trusted-proxies="192.0.0.1, 10.0.0.0/8">
        <!-- ... -->
    </framework>
</container>

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// app/config/config.php
$container->loadFromExtension('framework', array(
    'trusted_proxies' => array('192.0.0.1', '10.0.0.0/8'),
));

In this example, you're saying that your reverse proxy (or proxies) has the IP address 192.0.0.1 or matches the range of IP addresses that use the CIDR notation 10.0.0.0/8. For more details, see the framework.trusted_proxies option.

That's it! Symfony will now look for the correct headers to get information like the client's IP address, host, port and whether the request is using HTTPS.

But what if the IP of my Reverse Proxy Changes Constantly!

Some reverse proxies (like Amazon's Elastic Load Balancers) don't have a static IP address or even a range that you can target with the CIDR notation. In this case, you'll need to - very carefully - trust all proxies.

1. Configure your web server(s) to not respond to traffic from any clients other than your load balancers. For AWS, this can be done with security groups.

2. Once you've guaranteed that traffic will only come from your trusted reverse proxies, configure Symfony to always trust incoming request. This is done inside of your front controller:

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   // web/app.php
   
   // ...
   Request::setTrustedProxies(array('127.0.0.1', $request->server->get('REMOTE_ADDR')));
   
   $response = $kernel->handle($request);
   // ...

3. Ensure that the trusted_proxies setting in your app/config/config.yml is not set or it will overwrite the setTrustedProxies call above.

That's it! It's critical that you prevent traffic from all non-trusted sources. If you allow outside traffic, they could "spoof" their true IP address and other information.

My Reverse Proxy Uses Non-Standard (not X-Forwarded) Headers

Although RFC 7239 recently defined a standard Forwarded header to disclose all proxy information, most reverse proxies store information in non-standard X-Forwarded-* headers.

But if your reverse proxy uses other non-standard header names, you can configure these (see "Trusting Proxies").

The code for doing this will need to live in your front controller (e.g. web/app.php).