Configure Apache/Django on elastic beanstalk to address INVALID_HOST errors

Question

Background:

Current setup is

• Have a website hosted in AWS S3 (e.g. app.com)
• Have api server hosted in elastic beanstalk (e.g. api.com)
• Website makes api requests to api server

ALLOWED_HOST has been set in Django so that it includes

• The elastic beanstalk address
• The url for the api

Issues:

• The web app is working fine. However, I am seeing numerous requests to the api from random urls (bots, exploits, etc). This is firing off hundreds of Invalid HTTP_HOST header errors. I could obviously turn off the error notification, but that does not feel right.
• The log suggests adding bunch of ip addresses to the ALLOWED_HOST, most of which is the ip address of my load balancer. However, as my regular api requests are going through without problem, I doubt adding the IP address of load balancer to ALLOWED_HOST is the solution either.
• So that would leave changing the load balancer itself so that it does not direct requests to Django if it is invalid. I have found a few answer with regards to this such as
  • How to disable Django's invalid HTTP_HOST error?
  • Django Invalid HTTP_HOST header on Apache - fix using Require?

Two questions:

• Is the above modification the correct way to handle this problem?
• Is there a way to apply this programmatically to Elastic Beanstalk environment?

Will appreciate any help

Thank you!

Answer 1

These are probably the elastic beanstalk healthcheck calls. These come from an IP address.

Try adding to settings.py

from socket import gethostname, gethostbyname  # For AWS Healthchecker
HOST_NAME = gethostname()
HOST_IP = gethostbyname(HOST_NAME)
ALLOWED_HOSTS [ 
    ...
    HOME_NAME, HOME_IP,
    ...
]