Requests NOT passing through Cloudflare's network?

Question

From my understanding of Cloudflare - the service is supposed to act as a reverse proxy for your server/website. I have added my site to Cloudflare, assigned my nameservers to Cloudflare's nameservers, and have enabled my DNS records to be proxied. The issue I'm having is that requests sent to my site are NOT coming from Cloudflare? The requests are just coming from regular IP addresses. I can see the requests on Cloudflare's WAF event logger, but when the request gets to my actual site - it's just the persons IP address. How can I set it up to where all requests come directly from Cloudflare? I tried adding rules in my .htaccess to allow Cloudflare IPs, and block all other requests, but that just returns an HTTP 403 Forbidden error. Any ideas on what I may have messed up in my Cloudflare configuration, or how to fix this?

I tried adjusting firewall settings on the server, and various changes in .htaccess to force requests only from Cloudflare's.network

Answer 1

I think you're mixing two things: If you add your site to Cloudflare DNS, it will just reply to dns queries, but the traffic from each client will go directly to your site. If you want Cloudflare to proxy all the traffic to your site, you should use something like Cloudflare tunnels.