Implementing Smart Rate Limiting in Spring Boot

A practical guide to building a system-aware rate limiter with Bucket4j

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Introduction

Protecting your API from abuse is crucial. Rate limiting is key to your API security. It prevents denial-of-service attacks, manages resources, and ensures fair usage among clients. Spring Boot 3 and Bucket4j together provide a strong, flexible way to add rate limiting to your apps.

In this article, we will explore how to develop rate limiting using Bucket4j in a Spring Boot 3 application. We will cover different approaches and provide practical examples that you can adapt to your needs.

Prerequisites

Before start, ensure your have

• Java 17 or higher.
• Basic understanding of Java, Spring Boot, and API development.

Implementation

The first step is to add the required dependencies to your pom.xml or build.gradle.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.bucket4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>bucket4j-core</artifactId>
    <version>8.3.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.bucket4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>bucket4j-caffeine</artifactId>
    <version>8.3.0</version>
</dependency>…