Installing packages with the apt-get package manager on Ubuntu or Debian usually fetches the latest known version from the repositories. This is a comfortable behavior to use an up-to-date version of the package. If you want to install a specific package version, you can do that by appending an equal …

Authenticating users with JSON web tokens is a convenient strategy. The tokens are self-contained and may include all required information. The server side verifies a token, either trusts its digital signature and proceeds the request handling or declines processing. Two previous tutorials walk you through the process of generating JSON …

Mocha is a powerful testing framework for Node.js. It gives you dozens of helpful utilities to create a convenient testing setup. Mocha also provides an interceptable testing lifecycle. If you need to run setup and teardown tasks for your test suite, make sure to read on! {{outline}} Testing Setup …

This is the final tutorial in the “Build a Rate Limiter” series. The rate limiter has all important features to increase your application security. As with any software project, you should put aside time to review and refactor the code. By finishing this tutorial, you’ll push your rate limiter …

We recently launched an internal website. This website doesn’t have a landing page and provides the feature on a URL path. We wanted to redirect all requests navigating the root path / to the feature page using nginx. Here’s how we solved it. {{outline}} Redirect the Root URL Path …

Rate limiting is a security feature that comes with costs you need to manage. For example, once enabled, rate limiting applies to all requests going through your server. This can cause problems when using the rate limiter for both, APIs and web apps. Sending requests to web applications will render …

Introducing the rate limiter into your web application brings security benefits, but requires extra work to integrate it smoothly. In the previous tutorial, you added support to render a “rate limit exceeded” web view instead of sending a JSON response. The web view to show an exceeded limit was dragging …

Your rate limiter has a solid feature set: rate limit requests by IP address or a user identifier, allow dynamic rate limits and use a route-specific rate limit configuration. A missing feature is the support for web views. Up to this point, the rate limiter responds an error in JSON …