How to implement rate limiting for API endpoints with Nginx?

To implement rate limiting for API endpoints with Nginx, you can follow these steps:

Install Nginx if you haven't already.
Open your Nginx configuration file, typically located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or /etc/nginx/sites-available/default. You may also have separate .conf files for each endpoint in the sites-available directory.
In the server block or the specific endpoint block, add the limit_req_zone directive to define the rate limiting zone. This directive specifies the rate limits and the zone's name, which will be used for rate limiting. For example:

http {
  ...
  limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=mylimit:10m rate=10r/s;
}

In this example, the zone named mylimit will be created with a size of 10m, meaning it can store up to 10 megabytes of IP addresses. The rate limit is set to 10r/s, meaning each IP can make 10 requests per second.

Add the limit_req directive inside the location block of the desired API endpoint. This directive specifies how the rate limiting should be applied. For example:

location /api/endpoint {
  limit_req zone=mylimit burst=20 nodelay;
  ...
}

In this example, the rate limiting zone named mylimit is used with a burst value of 20. The nodelay parameter ensures that additional requests beyond the burst value are rejected immediately instead of being queued.

Save the configuration file and restart Nginx using the command sudo service nginx restart (or equivalent for your system) to apply the changes.

With these steps, rate limiting should be implemented for the specified API endpoint using Nginx. You can adjust the rate limits and other parameters according to your requirements.