How to disable logging IP address?

[Nina]

Hello,
I successfully run discourse and now I’d like to disable logging users’ IP address.
There are many discussion of it as part of EU GDPR(2018, 2019), but I could not find the concrete solution for it.

GDPR countdown and compliance

As we’re quickly approaching May 25th, here’s my (perhaps naive) understanding of certain key Discourse GDPR issues: Right to Be Forgotten If the user requests, the admin can use the user info panel to delete all of a user’s posts. Note you may need to up the “delete user max post age” and “delete all posts max” settings but then it’s possible. Once there are no more posts you can then delete the user. Alternatively, a less disruptive solution is the “Anonymize User” button…

Disabling unnecessary logging for GDPR compliance

I’d like to disable logging for my Discourse instance for several reasons: #gdpr paranoia - I do not want to be collecting and storing anything that’s surplus to requirements - especially where IP addresses are concerned* - anonymous users have not given me permission to collect their IPs. I don’t want to risk breaking this draconian and poorly-defined new law Performance - logging all request to disk is unnecessarily hammering my SSD, and probably incurs a small performance penalty when a…

I appreciate if someone guides me to find it!

[Nina]

Hello @codinghorror,
Is there any “How to” for your suggestion on Possible to not log user IP addresses? - #10 by codinghorror?
I see there were many demand on disabling IP logging in 2018 due to EU GDPR, so I expect there is simple solution already for this.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

You need ip addresses to fight abuse, so I think that most people have decided that the way that Discourse manages up addresses is not in violation of gdpr. I think that no plugin emerged to do what you ask.

A simple solution is to use an external reverse proxy and don’t configure discourse to use the reverse proxy ip address (which happens by default).

[adriaan]

For future searchers: you can use NGINX in front of the discourse instance, you can set the X-Real-IP to a fixed IP 127.0.0.1:

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://unix:/var/discourse/shared/standalone/nginx.http.sock:;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP 127.0.0.1;
  }

Do not leave it out because you will get errors and the app will fail to start:

Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 149ms (Views: 11.1ms | ActiveRecord: 0.0ms | Allocations: 70970)
PG::InvalidTextRepresentation (ERROR:  invalid input syntax for type inet: "unix:"
LINE 7:     client_ip = 'unix:',
                        ^
)