Production-Ready Nginx Rate Limiting: Stop Crawlers, Block Malicious Requests, Protect APIs
This guide explains how to use Nginx's built‑in limit_req and limit_conn modules to implement production‑grade rate limiting, covering leaky‑bucket theory, IP and API‑key based limits, burst and nodelay handling, whitelist bypass, custom error responses, dry‑run testing, memory sizing, and the inherent limitations that may require Redis‑Lua or OpenResty extensions.
