Prevent too much calls to API ENdpoint

When I say being careful I mean do you rate limit calls to endpoints that you build, If not you may need to start doing so, this is to prevent excessive usage from potentially ill-configured or malicious integrators, and we'll be doing that with a library named express-rate-limit.

You should simply install this library with npm i express-rate-limit and now let's get to the main task.

I'll be using a controller i'll name greet as an example, I don't want the same user to be greeted by the endpoint that is attached to this controller more than 3 times in 5 seconds.

This is my greet controller

export const greet = (req, res) => {
    res.status(200).json({
        status: true,
        message: "Welcome"
    })
}

Now to set the Limiter, you need to create an instance with the rateLimit keyword, this rate limit will contain 3 properties which is the windowMs, max and message.

import { rateLimit } from "express-rate-limit";

const limiter = rateLimit({
    windowMs: 5000,
    max: 3,
    message: "you can only be greeted 3 times in 5 seconds"
})

The windowMs is the milliseconds that each call will be checked, we set ours to 5000 which is 5 seconds, the max is the number of times the endpoint can be called and we set ours to 3 and the message is what will be returned if it exceeds the limit.

Now we are going to use the limiter we defined earlier.

import { Router } from "express";
const router = Router()
import { greet } from "../controllers/controller.js";

router.route("/greet").get(limiter, greet)

export default router

And when we test it we should get the message if it exceeds 3 calls

You've come this far, Thanks for reading.

Are you being careful with your APIs Endpoints?