flood¶ ↑

Flood is a Ruby library to limit events to a count/time ratio.

Installation¶ ↑

Install the gem:

gem install flood

When requiring, use ‘flood’ as the gem name:

require 'flood'

Introduction¶ ↑

There are many situations when it’s desirable to limit events that occur in a given time period. This library provides a framework for implementing rate limits.

Given a time interval and a maximum number of events that can occur in that period, the library determines whether the event should be permitted.

Storage¶ ↑

If you want flood control to persist across invocations of a script you must save the data. The storage method returns the flood data; you have to handle storage. To load stored flood data, call the storage= method with the flood data as a parameter.

Examples¶ ↑

A monitoring script should send no more than alert 1 email every 10 minutes.

email_limit = 1
email_interval = 10 * 60 # interval in seconds
flood = FloodControl.new(email_limit, email_interval)

if (flood.check() == 0)
  send_email
end

A form should only accept 5 submissions from a single IP address every hour.

submit_limit = 5
submit_interval = 60 * 60 # interval in seconds
flood = FloodControl.new(submit_limit, submit_interval)

if (flood.check(ip_address) == 0)
  send_email
else
  show_sorry_page
end

Users have varying limits based on group.

TODO: Variable limits example

Save and load flood data for persistence across invocations.

TODO: Persistence example

Note on Patches/Pull Requests¶ ↑

• Fork the project.

• Make your feature addition or bug fix.

• Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)

• Send me a pull request.

Copyright¶ ↑

Copyright © 2009 Neil Kohl. See LICENSE for details.