User and IP rate limits (CORE ONLY)

Rate limiting is a common technique used to improve the security and durability of a web application. For more details, see Rate limits.

The following limits can be enforced in Admin Area > Settings > Network > User and IP rate limits:

• Unauthenticated requests
• Authenticated API requests
• Authenticated web requests

These limits are disabled by default.

Use an HTTP header to bypass rate limiting

Introduced in GitLab 13.6.

Depending on the needs of your organization, you may want to enable rate limiting but have some requests bypass the rate limiter.

You can do this by marking requests that should bypass the rate limiter with a custom header. You must do this somewhere in a load balancer or reverse proxy in front of GitLab. For example:

1. Pick a name for your bypass header. For example, Gitlab-Bypass-Rate-Limiting.
2. Configure your load balancer to set Gitlab-Bypass-Rate-Limiting: 1 on requests that should bypass GitLab rate limiting.
3. Configure your load balancer to either:
   • Erase Gitlab-Bypass-Rate-Limiting.
   • Set Gitlab-Bypass-Rate-Limiting to a value other than 1 on all requests that should be affected by rate limiting.
4. Set the environment variable GITLAB_THROTTLE_BYPASS_HEADER.
   • For Omnibus, set 'GITLAB_THROTTLE_BYPASS_HEADER' => 'Gitlab-Bypass-Rate-Limiting' in gitlab_rails['env'].
   • For source installations, set export GITLAB_THROTTLE_BYPASS_HEADER=Gitlab-Bypass-Rate-Limiting in /etc/default/gitlab.

It is important that your load balancer erases or overwrites the bypass header on all incoming traffic, because otherwise you must trust your users to not set that header and bypass the GitLab rate limiter.

Note that the bypass only works if the header is set to 1.

Requests that bypassed the rate limiter because of the bypass header will be marked with "throttle_safelist":"throttle_bypass_header" in production_json.log.

To disable the bypass mechanism, make sure the environment variable GITLAB_THROTTLE_BYPASS_HEADER is unset or empty.