ratelimit

APIs are a very common way to interact with web services. As the need to consume data grows, so does the number of API calls necessary to remain up to date with data sources. However many API providers constrain developers from making too many API calls. This is know as rate limiting and in a worst case scenario your application can be banned from making further API calls if it abuses these limits.

This packages introduces a method decorator preventing a method from being called more than once within a given time period. This should prevent API providers from banning your applications by conforming to set rate limits.

Installation

PyPi

To install ratelimit, simply:

$ pip install ratelimit

GitHub

Installing the latest version from Github:

$ git clone https://github.com/tomasbasham/ratelimit
$ cd ratelimit
$ python setup.py install

Usage

To use this package you simply have to declare the decorator before the method you wish to rate limit:

from ratelimit import rate_limited
import requests

ONE_HOUR = 3600

@rate_limited(100, ONE_HOUR)
def call_api(self, url):
  response = requests.get(url)

  if response.status_code != 200:
    raise ApiError('Cannot call API: {}'.format(response.status_code))
  return response

This method makes a call to our API. Note that this method has been implemented with a decorator enforcing that it may only be called 100 times per hour.

The argument passed into the decorator imposes the number of method invocation allowed over a time period specified (in seconds). If no time period is specified then it default to 1 second.

Contributing