New RateLimiter facade for defining named rate limiters in Laravel 8
In the previous versions of Laravel, up to 7.x, when you wanted to rate limit certain routes, you could do it by assigning the throttle middleware to the route or group of routes like so.
Route::get('admin/profile', function () {
//
})->middleware('auth', 'throttle:30,1');
Here, the 30, 1 part signifies that the above route configuration will allow an authenticated user access route 30 times per minute. If the user exceeds this limit within the specified period, Laravel would return a 429 Too Many Requests response.
As you can tell, the numbers here are hard-coded and there isn’t anything using which you can make this configurations dynamic or re-utilize the same configuration across different routes or route groups.
- The
RateLimiterfacade - Using the named rate limiter
- Making rate limiters dynamic
- Returning a custom response
- In closing
Laravel 8 tends to solve these issues by introducing a RateLimiter facade. Let’s explore it in detail.
The RateLimiter facade
In a nutshell, Laravel 8 has introduced an Illuminate\Support\Facades\RateLimiter facade using which you can define “named” rate limiters of different configurations. As these are named rate limiters, they can be used across routes and route groups.
Also, you can define multiple rate limiters for different use-cases which can be handy.
You can define all your rate limiters in the boot method of the AppServiceProvider. So, for instance, if you want to define a rate limiter called limitadmin, you can do it like so.
<?php
namespace App\Providers;
use Illuminate\Cache\RateLimiting\Limit;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\RateLimiter;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
// code commented for brevity
public function boot()
{
RateLimiter::for('limitadmin', function (Request $request) {
return Limit::perMinute(3);
});
}
}
As you can tell, the RateLimiter’s for method accepts two parameters.
- The name of the rate limiter.
- A Closure that returns the limit configuration that should apply to routes that are assigned this rate limiter.
In the Closure, you can return the actual rate-limiting logic using the Illuminate\Cache\RateLimiting\Limit’s perMinute method. In which, you can define how many times a user is allowed to access the route per minute.
Using the named rate limiter
Once defined, the rate limiter can be assigned to a route like so.
Route::get('profile', function () {
//
})->middleware(['throttle:limitadmin']);
As you can see, instead of passing in the hard-coded configuration, you can use the name of the rate limiter. This makes the rate-limiting re-usable and clean to look at.
Making rate limiters dynamic
Apart from defining “named” rate limiters, you can also make the rate-limiting dynamic based on certain conditions.
As we’ve seen, the Closure of the for method receives the Illuminate\Http\Request object, we can use it to make the rate-limiting dynamic. For instance, if we want to limit the regular user and bypass the admin user for any sort of rate-limiting, we can do it like so.
RateLimiter::for('limitadmin', function (Request $request) {
return $request->user()->type == 'admin'
? Limit::none()
: Limit::perMinute(3);
});
As you can see, using the none() method you can create a rate limiter with an unlimited rate limit.
Returning a custom response
You can also return a custom response instead of Laravel’s standard 429 Too Many Requests using the response method like so.
RateLimiter::for('book', function (Request $request) {
return Limit::perMinute(3)->response(function() {
return new Response('Beep! Beep! Too many attempts');
});
});
In closing
The new RateLimiter facade is awesome and it actually makes the rate-limiting in Laravel easy to manage, scalable, and more enjoyable to use. You should consider refactoring your rate limiters to using this if you’re upgrading to Laravel 8.
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