Cloudflare is a very powerful tool. You can use it to manage your DNS entries, adding an additional layer of security to your site, improving your site’s speed, and many other things. However, as with any other man-made creations, cloudflare isn’t perfect. In this article we’re gonna explain one of the problems that might happen when you are using cloudflare on your site.
When you are enabling cloudflare proxy for your site (see above image), cloudflare by default will apply some firewall rules to your domain so that (hopefully) you won’t get hacked. This feature works fine most of the time. But, sometimes cloudflare blocks legitimate connection requests. We had several chances where cloudflare blocked our own connection. That’s mostly because of WAF (Web Application Firewall) false positives.
If you have similar situation, then here’s what you can do to deal with such situation:
- Add the client’s IP address(es) to the IP Access Rules whitelist. This is what we have done in our case, because we always use the same IP address.
- Disable the WAF rule(s). You can see which rule blocks your request by going to your firewall summary, then simply disable the corresponding WAF rule. This is not the best solution because your overall site security is reduced.
- Bypass the WAF with a Firewall Rule. You will need to create a custom Firewall Rule for this.
- Disable WAF completely for specific traffic to a URL. You can configure this via Page Rules, but this is not good practice because you will lose all the WAF benefits.
That’s what we know so far. You can read more about it on Cloudflare documentation here.
