Nginx proxy with rate limit

Tags

Basics

Nginx proxy is very popular against direct application exposure. Besides it has a handy request rate limit functionality that can be done through limit_req_zone & limit_req config items as;

Experiment

Lets have a simple experiment setup to test this configuration. As a web server, prepare a dummy http request handler working at port 8080

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "net/http"
)

func requestHandler(res http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprint(res, "Everything's Gonna Be Alright!")
}

func main() {
    // register requestHandler to incoming requests for "/"
    http.HandleFunc("/", requestHandler)

    // run http server on the port 8080
    log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))
}

Then use a nginx proxy in front with the config

events {
}

http {
    limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=webSrv:10m rate=5r/s;
    server {
        listen 80;
        location / {
            limit_req zone=webSrv burst=10 nodelay;
            proxy_pass http://web-srv:8080;
        }
    }
}

A docker compose file will be sufficient to have orchestration. Notice that containers using the same network namespace can use container names as resource url like http://web-srv:8080, that is used in the proxy config above.

version: '3'
services:
  proxy:
    image: nginx:latest
    container_name: proxy-srv
    volumes:
      - ./proxy/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro
    ports:
      - 9090:80
    networks:
      - proxy-net
      - web-net
  
  web:
    image: loadtest-web:latest
    container_name: web-srv
    expose:
      - "8080"
    networks:
      - web-net

networks:
  proxy-net:
  web-net: