Rate Limiting Techniques in Node.js & Express

Rate Limiting Techniques in Node.js & Express

Hello coder! Today, I’ll talk to you about a very important subject: Rate Limiting. Think about it like house parties. You’re the host, and imagine a crowd of people suddenly at your door. If you allow everyone to enter without control, the experience for everyone in the house won’t be pleasant. In this scenario, as the host, it’s your job to control who gets in. This is the basic principle of rate limiting.

Rate limiting restricts the number of requests our application can handle from a user within a specific timeframe. This way, malicious users and bots can’t overload our service and ruin the experience for other users. Now, let’s dive deeper into this complex topic.

Starting with Express Rate Limiting

When creating a web server with Node.js and Express, there are several libraries available for rate limiting. One of the most popular is express-rate-limit. We can use this library to protect our application from being overloaded.

First, let’s add express-rate-limit to our project.

npm install express-rate-limit

Now, let’s include the library in our project and create a rate limiter.

const rateLimit = require("express-rate-limit");

const limiter = rateLimit({
  windowMs: 15 * 60 * 1000, //…