Question

I am currently writing a REST API using Symfony2. I started using Symfony2 one month ago and i’m currently facing a technical difficulty.

While writing my API I wanted to rate limit the API calls by IP addresses or by user (i.e if the user is logged in I’m using his id, a timestamp and his IP address to keep a trace of his connection, if he’s not logged in, I just save his IP address and a timestamp in my database).
To do this I wrote a service implementing VoterInterface and who’s called by Symfony everytime a user accesses a controller and checks whether he didn’t exceed the API rate limit by hour or by day (they’re both hardcoded)). This works fine until now.

But I want something more customizable and scalable, I would like to set up for each controller their own limit so I could control and change easily my API rate limit for each one. My idea is to use an annotation like the ones you can use with the JMSSecurityExtraBundle and specify on the top of each of my controllers something like :

/**
 * My API - UserController::registerAction
 *
 * @RateLimit(hour="200", day="2000")
 */
public function registerAction($format)

And then retrieve the annotation informations in my rate limiter class to fill the limits informations.
The problem is I didn’t manage to find how and I need some help. My solution works, I just need something more powerfull. I already thought about storing these informations in a YAML file or in a database, but this is not a good solution to me since it creates an unnecessary dependency between my controllers and a persistence.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

See the AOP Bundle — it provides the means for doing what you want.