Whitelisting Your Load Test Server IP at Cloudflare

Published: October 31, 2019

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Recently I needed to load test an application that sat behind Cloudflare. I tried Google and didn’t find much beyond a thread on the Cloudflare forum’s titled “How to whitelist load testing IPs”.

The thread concludes with sandro suggesting using an “access rule”.

But what is an access rule?

At first it seemed it was something you’d configure via the “Access” link in the Cloudflare dashboard.

Screenshot showing Cloudflare dashboard

However, when I read the description of Cloudflare Access I became skeptical as to whether or not I was in the right place…

Access protects internal resources by authenticating against identity providers you already use. With Access, you can control which users and groups can reach sensitive materials without a VPN or making code changes to your site.

Fortunately some more careful Googling brought me to the “Configuring IP Access Rules” Cloudflare Support article.

I can confirm that I was able to load test the site successfully by configuring a “Whitelist” access rule as instructed in that support article.

Screenshot showing setting up an IP Access Rule in Cloudflare

Max Chadwick Hi, I'm Max!

I'm a software developer who mainly works in PHP, but loves dabbling in other languages like Go and Ruby. Technical topics that interest me are monitoring, security and performance. I'm also a stickler for good documentation and clear technical writing.

During the day I lead a team of developers and solve challenging technical problems at Rightpoint where I mainly work with the Magento platform. I've also spoken at a number of events.

In my spare time I blog about tech, work on open source and participate in bug bounty programs.

If you'd like to get in contact, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.