gotosocial/docs/configuration/trusted_proxies.md

Trusted Proxies

To correctly enforce rate limiting, GoToSocial relies on the concept of "trusted proxies" in order to accurately determine the IP address of clients accessing your server.

A "trusted proxy" is an intermediate network hop that GoToSocial can be instructed to trust to provide a correct client IP address.

For example, if you are running in a reverse proxy configuration with Docker + Nginx, then the Docker network address of Nginx should be configured as a trusted proxy, since all traffic from the wider internet will come into GoToSocial via Nginx.

Without setting trusted-proxies correctly, GoToSocial will see all incoming client IP addresses as the same address, which leads to rate limiting issues, since GoToSocial uses client IP addresses to bucket rate limits.

tl;dr: How to set trusted-proxies correctly

If your trusted-proxies setting is not correctly configured, you may see the following warning on the web view of your instance (v0.18.0 and above):

Warning! It looks like trusted-proxies is not set correctly in this instance's configuration. This may cause rate-limiting issues and, by extension, federation issues.

If you are the instance admin, you should fix this by adding SUGGESTED_IP_RANGE to your trusted-proxies.

To resolve this, copy the IP range in the message, and edit your config.yaml file to add the IP range to your trusted-proxies.

!!! tip "You may be getting rate limited even if you don't see the above warning!" If you're on a version of GoToSocial below v0.18.0, or you're running behind a CDN such as Cloudflare (not recommended), you won't see a warning message. Instead, you'll see in your GoToSocial logs that all client IPs are the same address. In this case, take the recurring client IP value as SUGGESTED_IP_RANGE.

In this example, we assume SUGGESTED_IP_RANGE to be 172.17.0.1/16 (the default Docker bridge network subnet).

Before (default config):

trusted-proxies:
    - "127.0.0.1/32"
    - "::1"

After (new config):

trusted-proxies:
    - "172.17.0.1/16"
    - "127.0.0.1/32"
    - "::1"

If you are using environment variables to configure your instance, you can configure trusted-proxies by setting the environment variable GTS_TRUSTED_PROXIES to a comma-separated list of IP ranges, like so:

GTS_TRUSTED_PROXIES="172.17.0.1/16,127.0.0.1/32,::1"

If you are using docker compose, your docker-compose.yaml file should look something like this after the change (note that yaml uses : and not =):

################################
# BLAH BLAH OTHER CONFIG STUFF #
################################
    environment:
      ############################
      # BLAH BLAH OTHER ENV VARS #
      ############################
      ## For reverse proxy setups:
      GTS_TRUSTED_PROXIES: "172.17.0.1/16,127.0.0.1/32,::1"
################################
# BLAH BLAH OTHER CONFIG STUFF #
################################

Once you have made the necessary configuration changes, restart your instance and refresh the home page. If the message is gone, then the problem is resolved!

If you still see the warning message but with a different suggested IP range to add to trusted-proxies, then follow the same steps as above again, including the new suggested IP range in your config in addition to the one you just added.

!!! tip "Cloudflare IP Addresses" If you are running with a CDN/proxy such as Cloudflare in front of your GoToSocial instance (not recommended), then you may need to add one or more of the Cloudflare IP addresses to your trusted-proxies in order to have rate limiting work properly. You can find a list of Cloudflare IP addresses here: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/