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Cloudflare on Drupal 7 - some thoughts

As you know, spam is a pain in the arse and you would do almost anything to stop it. I've read on some blog that Cloudflare service helps stopping spam. Great, I said! I will also benefit from their CDN service, all in one package!

Yeah, right!

After enabling the Cloudflare rerouting I started getting all sorts of errors, none of them logged on the server side. Not in Drupal recent logs, not in user error_log, not even in the Apache error_log! How on earth should I suppose to debug this? I've done a couple of other things after I enabled the Cloudflare service so I didn't know what can be the source of troubles.

I even installed the Cloudflare module, put in the API key, made the modification in settings.php. Nothing helped.

Some errors ecountered are:

  • WSOD while executing some batch jobs;
  • Broken javascripts
  • Even more spam!

After hours of trial and error I reverted the DNS settings back to normal and disabled the Cloudflare DNS. Everything started to work again.

My advice is to not even think about Cloudflare optimization features if your website is already online, with thousands of visitors a day. 

Too bad! The idea is great, but the implementation is poor. Maybe in few years I'll give it another try.

What was your experience with the Cloudflare module?

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