IP Access rules
Use IP Access rules to allowlist, block, and challenge traffic based on the visitor’s IP address, country, or Autonomous System Number (ASN).
IP Access rules are commonly used to block or challenge suspected malicious traffic. Another common use of IP Access rules is to allow services that regularly access your site, such as APIs, crawlers, and payment providers.
You can create IP Access rules in the Cloudflare dashboard or via API.
Availability
IP Access rules are available to all customers.
Each Cloudflare account can have a maximum of 50,000 rules. If you are an Enterprise customer and need more rules, contact your account team.
Block by country is only available on the Enterprise plan. Other customers may perform country blocking using firewall rules.
Important remarks
Allowing a country code does not bypass WAF Managed Rulesets or WAF managed rules (previous version).
By design, IP Access rules configured to Allow traffic do not show up in Firewall Analytics.
Requests containing certain attack patterns in the
User-Agentfield are checked before being processed by the general firewall pipeline. Therefore, such requests are blocked before any allowlist logic takes place. When this occurs, firewall events downloaded from the API showrule_idassecurity_leveland action asdrop.Cloudflare supports use of
fail2banto block IPs on your server. However, to preventfail2banfrom inadvertently blocking Cloudflare IPs and causing errors for some visitors, ensure you restore original visitor IP in your origin server logs. For details, refer to Restoring original visitor IPs.
Related resources
To learn more about protection options provided by Cloudflare to protect your website against malicious traffic and bad actors, refer to Secure your website.