Rate Limiting and Abuse Protection for Public Rails APIs

Public APIs attract scrapers, brute force, and accidental infinite loops. Rate limiting is product infrastructure.

I cover Rack::Attack, Redis-backed keys, per-tenant limits, and response headers that help partners self-serve.

What you'll learn

• Key strategies: IP vs API key vs user
• Returning Retry-After without leaking internals
• Testing limits in request specs

Next steps

Document limits in your developer portal before someone hits them in prod.