Web server configs¶

Heroku¶

If the X-Request-ID header is not passed automatically you may need to enable it using the labs command:

heroku labs:enable http-request-id

See http-request-id for more info.

The request_id will also appear in the Heroku Dyno logs so it is easy to match application logs with Heroku request logs.

Nginx¶

There’s no built-in option in Nginx to generate a unique request id, but there are several modules that provide this functionality:

nginx_requestid

nginx-x-rid-header

Unfortunately this require Nginx binary recompilation.

Alternatively, if your Nginx has Lua scripting enabled, you can generate a random id and add it to server logs using the following snippets:

http {
    ...

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for" '
                      'request_id=$request_id';
    ...
}

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;

    access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

    location / {
        set_by_lua $request_id '
            local function random_id()
                local charset = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
                local template = "xxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx"
                local range = charset:len()
                return string.gsub(template, "x", function (c)
                    return string.char(charset:byte(math.random(1, range)))
                end)
            end
            local request_id = random_id()
            ngx.req.set_header("X-Request-Id", request_id)
            return request_id
        ';

        ...
    }

Apache¶

On Apache you need to a2enmod the unique_id module and set REQUEST_ID_HEADER = "UNIQUE_ID" in the Django project settings.

Standalone¶

If you can’t generate the X-Request-Id header at the web server level then simply set REQUEST_ID_HEADER = None in your project settings and the app will generate a unique id value automatically instead of retrieving it from the wsgi environment.

You can also use the request_id.wsgi.AddRequestIdHeaderMiddleware WSGI middleware for that purpose.