Rate Limiting

Rate limiting is often used to protect applications from brute-force attacks by controlling the rate of requests sent or received by the server. It can be used to prevent DoS attacks and limit web scraping.

Currently, there is no class provided by dolphjs for implementing rate-limiting. This is one of the next features to be included in the next first releases.

However, using the express-rate-limit package, we can implement rate limiting:

Implementing local level Rate limiting

shared/middlewares/rate_limit.middleware.ts

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

class RateLimiterClass {

  init(): RateLimitRequestHandler {

    const limiter = rateLimit({
      windowMs: 6 * 1000, // 6 seconds
      max: 2, // limit each IP to 2 requests per windowMs
      message: "Too many requests, please try again later.",
    });
    return limiter;
  }
}

export const RateLimiter = new RateLimiterClass();

Now, let us call use middleware in our controller:

user.controller.ts

import { DolphControllerHandler } from "@dolphjs/dolph/classes";
import { Patch, Route, Shield, UseMiddleware } from "@dolphjs/dolph/decorators";
import { Dolph, SuccessResponse, DRequest, DResponse } from "@dolphjs/dolph/common";
import { RateLimiter } from "@/shared/middlewares/rate_limit.middleware";
import { UserService } from "./user.service";
import { Role } from "./roles.enum.ts";


@Shield([AuthShield, Authorize(Role.User)])
@Route("user")
export class AuthController extends DolphControllerHandler<Dolph>{
    private UserService: UserService;
    constructor(){
        super();
    }

    @Patch("update")
    @UseMiddleware(RateLimiter.Init())
    updateProfile(req: DRequest, res: DResponse) {
        const { bio }: { bio: string} = req.body;

        const result = this.UserService.findOneByUsernameAndUpdate(user.sub, bio);

        SuccessResponse({ res, body: { msg: "User profile updated successfully", data: result } });
    };
};

Global Rate Limiting

You can also register the rate limiter globally:

server.ts

import { DolphFactory, middlewareRegistry } from "@dolphjs/dolph";
import { RateLimiter } from "./shared/middlewares/rate_limit.middleware";
import { UserComponent } from "./components/user/user.component.ts";

middlewareRegistry.register(RateLimiter.init());

const dolph = new DolphFactory([UserComponent]);

dolph.start();