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    Develop on the web portal
      1 - Setup Your Gateway2 - Rate Limiting3 - API Key Auth4 - Deploy5 - Dynamic Rate LimitingDynamic MCP Server - Quickstart
    Develop locally with the CLI
      1 - Setup Your Gateway2 - Rate Limiting3 - API Key Auth4 - Deploy5 - Dynamic Rate LimitingDynamic MCP Server - Quickstart
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Step 2 - Add Rate Limiting

In this guide we'll add simple Rate Limiting to a route. If you don't have one ready, complete Step 1 first.

Rate Limiting is one of our most popular policies - you should never ship an API without rate limiting because your customers or internal developers will accidentally DoS your API; usually with a rogue useEffect call in React code.

What's a Policy?

Policies are modules that can intercept and transform an incoming request or outgoing response. Zuplo offers a wide range of policies built-in (including rate limiting) to save you time. You can check out the full list.

Zuplo offers a programmable approach to rate limiting that allows you to vary how rate limiting is applied for each customer or request.

In this example, we'll add a simple IP-based rate limiter, but you should also explore dynamic rate limiting to see the full power of the world's best rate limiter.

  1. Add the rate-limiting Policy

    Open the local Route Designer at http://localhost:9100. If your gateway isn't already running, start it from your project directory with npm run dev.

    Select your route and click Add Policy on the incoming request policies section.

    http://localhost:9100/?path=routes.oas.json

    Add Policy

    Search for the Rate Limiting policy (not the "Complex" one) and click it.

    Add rate-limiting policy

    By default, the policy will rate limit based on the caller's IP address (as indicated by the rateLimitBy field). It will allow 2 requests (requestsAllowed) every 1 minute (timeWindowMinutes). You can explore the rest of the policy's documentation and configuration in the right panel.

    Rate limiting policy

    To apply the policy, click Create Policy, then save your changes.

  2. Testing your Policy

    Now try firing some requests against your API. You should receive a 429 Too many requests on your 3rd request. You can use any API test tool you prefer, such as Postman, HTTPie, or curl.

    TerminalCode
    curl http://localhost:9000/todos

    After you make the request 3 times you will see a response similar to:

    Code
    { "type": "https://httpproblems.com/http-status/429", "title": "Too Many Requests", "status": 429, "instance": "/todos", "trace": { "timestamp": "2025-08-26T21:50:40.220Z", "requestId": "4c62d425-2cb0-4a6c-9ac0-8d04a5f10c57", "buildId": "f49c4070-7c0a-441b-a5fd-4e35b5fe41b7" } }

    Your rate limiting policy is now intercepting excess requests, protecting your API.

NEXT Try Step 3 - Add API Key Authentication.

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Last modified on May 31, 2026
1 - Setup Your Gateway3 - API Key Auth
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