Introducing Rate Keeper: A Compact Utility for Robust Rate Limiting

Tired of handling rate limits with every API? Meet rate-keeper – an elegant, lightweight npm package designed to keep your API interactions within safe bounds with minimal effort. Featuring an intuitive interface and a small footprint, this utility seamlessly integrates into your codebase, ensuring your application remains stable, reliable, and considerate to external services.

Why Rate Limiting Matters

When interfacing with APIs, it's easy to exceed rate limits when making excessive requests in rapid succession. Rate limiting is essential for preventing your application from overwhelming APIs and for safeguarding external services from misuse. It plays a crucial role in building resilient, production-grade systems reliant on third-party data. However, implementing effective rate limiting can often be tedious, and sometimes present challenges.

This is where rate-keeper excels.

rate-keeper provides a straightforward solution for adding rate limits to your functions, allowing you to stay within API thresholds effortlessly. Whether you are logging messages, retrieving data, or repeatedly invoking API calls, rate-keeper empowers you to maintain control over the flow of operations.

Features at a Glance

• Define Actions with Rate Limits: Enforce a minimum delay between function invocations to ensure rate compliance.
• Manage Multiple Queues by ID: Segregate function calls into independent or grouped queues for streamlined execution.
• Prevent Overloading: Effectively manage API usage to avoid exceeding rate limits and disrupting integration.
• Simple Integration: Get up and running quickly with minimal changes to your JavaScript or TypeScript codebase.

At only 15.9 kB unpacked, rate-keeper is a small but powerful addition to your toolkit, capable of handling complex rate-limiting needs with ease.

Getting Started

To install, simply run:

npm install rate-keeper

Here's an example of rate-keeper in action:

Basic Usage

Need to limit the frequency of log messages?

import RateKeeper from "rate-keeper";

const safeLogger = RateKeeper(logMessage, 500); // Enforces a minimum interval of 500ms between calls.

safeLogger("Message 1");
safeLogger("Message 2");
safeLogger("Message 3");

With rate-keeper, each log call is spaced by 500 milliseconds, ensuring a controlled output rate.

Managing Queues

rate-keeper also supports creating queues, which helps organize and stagger the execution of multiple actions:

import RateKeeper from "rate-keeper";

const queueID = 1001;

const logger1 = RateKeeper(logMessage, 500, { id: queueID });
const logger2 = RateKeeper(logMessage, 500, { id: queueID });

logger1("Queue Message 1");
logger2("Queue Message 2");

In this setup, rate-keeper coordinates multiple loggers using a shared queue, ensuring each action executes sequentially.

Asynchronous Handling Made Easy

rate-keeper also supports asynchronous workflows by wrapping functions and returning a promise, facilitating straightforward use with async/await or promise chaining.

safeLogger("Hello World 1").then((result) => {
  // Handle the result here
});

Seamless Integration

Adding rate limiting should be effortless, and with rate-keeper, it is. Forget about cumbersome APIs or bulky dependencies – rate-keeper offers a clean, minimalistic approach that integrates seamlessly into existing projects. Plus, it provides TypeScript support out of the box, offering type safety and an improved development experience.

By integrating rate-keeper into your workflow, you can significantly streamline the process of handling rate limits. Instead of manually managing delays or writing custom rate-limiting logic for each API interaction, rate-keeper allows you to abstract these details away, enabling a more efficient and organized approach.

Whether you are developing a microservice that interacts with multiple third-party APIs or a front-end application that needs to stay within usage constraints, rate-keeper seamlessly fits into your setup. Its ease of integration means that developers can quickly adopt it without altering their existing codebase significantly. The ability to create separate queues by ID and control execution flow makes it especially useful in more complex scenarios where multiple services need to operate concurrently but within set limits.

By automating rate limiting, rate-keeper saves you valuable development time, allowing you to focus on the core logic of your application. Instead of worrying about throttling or dealing with unexpected API errors, you can trust rate-keeper to handle the nuances of rate compliance, ensuring that your application stays resilient and performs optimally even under strict rate constraints.

Ready to take control of your rate limits? npm i rate-keeper – simplify your workflow and let your code flow smoothly.