Currently, Discourse rate limits all incoming requests by the IP address they
originate from regardless of the user making the request. This can be
frustrating if there are multiple users using Discourse simultaneously while
sharing the same IP address (e.g. employees in an office).
This commit implements a new feature to make Discourse apply rate limits by
user id rather than IP address for users at or higher than the configured trust
level (1 is the default).
For example, let's say a Discourse instance is configured to allow 200 requests
per minute per IP address, and we have 10 users at trust level 4 using
Discourse simultaneously from the same IP address. Before this feature, the 10
users could only make a total of 200 requests per minute before they got rate
limited. But with the new feature, each user is allowed to make 200 requests
per minute because the rate limits are applied on user id rather than the IP
address.
The minimum trust level for applying user-id-based rate limits can be
configured by the `skip_per_ip_rate_limit_trust_level` global setting. The
default is 1, but it can be changed by either adding the
`DISCOURSE_SKIP_PER_IP_RATE_LIMIT_TRUST_LEVEL` environment variable with the
desired value to your `app.yml`, or changing the setting's value in the
`discourse.conf` file.
Requests made with API keys are still rate limited by IP address and the
relevant global settings that control API keys rate limits.
Before this commit, Discourse's auth cookie (`_t`) was simply a 32 characters
string that Discourse used to lookup the current user from the database and the
cookie contained no additional information about the user. However, we had to
change the cookie content in this commit so we could identify the user from the
cookie without making a database query before the rate limits logic and avoid
introducing a bottleneck on busy sites.
Besides the 32 characters auth token, the cookie now includes the user id,
trust level and the cookie's generation date, and we encrypt/sign the cookie to
prevent tampering.
Internal ticket number: t54739.
Allow admins to configure exceptions to our Rails rate limiter.
Configuration happens in the environment variables, and work with both
IPs and CIDR blocks.
Example:
```
env:
DISCOURSE_MAX_REQS_PER_IP_EXCEPTIONS: >-
14.15.16.32/27
216.148.1.2
```
For sites with login_required set to true, counting anonymous pageviews is
confusing. Requests to /login and other pages would make it look like
anonymous users have access to site's content.
Fixes `Rack::Lint::LintError: a header value must be a String, but the value of 'Retry-After' is a Integer`. (see: 14a236b4f0/lib/rack/lint.rb (L676))
I found it when I got flooded by those warning a while back in a test-related accident 😉 (ember CLI tests were hitting a local rails server at a fast rate)
The regular expression to detect private IP addresses did not always detect them successfully.
Changed to use ruby's in-built IPAddr.new(ip_address).private? method instead
which does the same thing but covers all cases.
It returned a 429 error code with a 'Retry-After' header if a
RateLimiter::LimitExceeded was raised and unhandled, but the header was
missing if the request was limited in the 'RequestTracker' middleware.
Non UTF-8 user_agent requests were bypassing logging due to PG always
wanting UTF-8 strings.
This adds some conversion to ensure we are always dealing with UTF-8
Zeitwerk simplifies working with dependencies in dev and makes it easier reloading class chains.
We no longer need to use Rails "require_dependency" anywhere and instead can just use standard
Ruby patterns to require files.
This is a far reaching change and we expect some followups here.
This commit introduces 2 features:
1. DISCOURSE_COMPRESS_ANON_CACHE (true|false, default false): this allows
you to optionally compress the anon cache body entries in Redis, can be
useful for high load sites with Redis that lives on a separate server to
to webs
2. DISCOURSE_ANON_CACHE_STORE_THRESHOLD (default 2), only pop entries into
redis if we observe them more than N times. This avoids situations where
a crawler can walk a big pile of topics and store them all in Redis never
to be used. Our default anon cache time for topics is only 60 seconds. Anon
cache is in place to avoid the "slashdot" effect where a single topic is
hit by 100s of people in one minute.
This allows custom plugins such as prometheus exporter to log how many
requests are stored in the anon cache vs used by the anon cache.
This metric allows us to fine tune cache behaviors
This adds support for DISCOURSE_ENABLE_PERFORMANCE_HTTP_HEADERS
when set to `true` this will turn on performance related headers
```text
X-Redis-Calls: 10 # number of redis calls
X-Redis-Time: 1.02 # redis time in seconds
X-Sql-Commands: 102 # number of SQL commands
X-Sql-Time: 1.02 # duration in SQL in seconds
X-Queue-Time: 1.01 # time the request sat in queue (depends on NGINX)
```
To get queue time NGINX must provide: HTTP_X_REQUEST_START
We do not recommend you enable this without thinking, it exposes information
about what your page is doing, usually you would only enable this if you
intend to strip off the headers further down the stream in a proxy
Since 5bfe051e, Discourse user agents are marked as non-crawlers (to avoid accidental blacklisting). This makes sure pageviews for these agents are tracked as crawler hits.
This change both speeds up specs (less strings to allocate) and helps catch
cases where methods in Discourse are mutating inputs.
Overall we will be migrating everything to use #frozen_string_literal: true
it will take a while, but this is the first and safest move in this direction
Detailed request loggers can be used to gather rich timing info
from all requests (which in turn can be forwarded to monitoring solution)
Middleware::RequestTracker.detailed_request_logger(->|env, data| do
# do stuff with env and data
end
Since rspec-rails 3, the default installation creates two helper files:
* `spec_helper.rb`
* `rails_helper.rb`
`spec_helper.rb` is intended as a way of running specs that do not
require Rails, whereas `rails_helper.rb` loads Rails (as Discourse's
current `spec_helper.rb` does).
For more information:
https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/docs/upgrade#default-helper-files
In this commit, I've simply replaced all instances of `spec_helper` with
`rails_helper`, and renamed the original `spec_helper.rb`.
This brings the Discourse project closer to the standard usage of RSpec
in a Rails app.
At present, every spec relies on loading Rails, but there are likely
many that don't need to. In a future pull request, I hope to introduce a
separate, minimal `spec_helper.rb` which can be used in tests which
don't rely on Rails.
