Installing the extension

With thousands of sites on the internet using TYPO3, many TYPO3 sites have decided to use Cloudflare to make their site faster with this free CDN and to make the site more secure with their security services.

We will cover the recommended first steps so that any TYPO3 administrator should be able to get Cloudflare up and running in a few minutes.

Step 1

Install the Cloudflare TYPO3 extension to restore visitor IP. Since Cloudflare acts as a proxy for sites, Cloudflare’s IPs are going to show in your logs, unless you install something to restore the original visitor IP.

This extension can be installed through the typical TYPO3 installation process using the Extension Manager or using composer, if you prefer.

Step 2

Review your basic security settings.

If you have a site that is frequently the target of spam or botnet attacks, changing your security level to a higher setting will help further reduce the amount of spam you get on your site. Cloudflare defaults all users to a medium setting when you first add the domain to Cloudflare.

Why do this? If you want your site to have less security and protection from various attacks, then you would want to change your setting to a lower level (please keep in mind this makes your site more vulnerable). If you want your site to have higher security, please keep in mind that you may get more false positives from visitors complaining about a challenge page that they have to pass to enter your site.

Step 3

To do so, create a Page Rule to exclude the typo3 sections from Cloudflare’s caching and performance features. You can access Page Rules in your Cloudflare dashboard.

URL pattern: www.example.com/typo3/*
Performance: off