Limiting requests’ payload maximum size

Document updated on Apr 12, 2024

Consumers of the gateway might see their requests limited when using the max_payload property. All requests are validated when this attribute is set, checking that their size is inside the limits set.

There are two possible placements of this attribute:

• At the service level: limits the requests of all activity
• At the endpoint level: limits the requests of specific endpoints

You can set both limits simultaneously if you want. When both limits exist, the service level limit is checked first, and if it passes, then it checks the endpoint limit. This means that the endpoint max_payload must be equal to or smaller than the one at the service. Otherwise, the endpoint limit will never have an opportunity to work.

When users exceed the maximum number of bytes, they get the following status code:

HTTP/1.1 413 Request Entity Too Large

Limit the request size of all calls

When you want to limit the maximum request size of any request, add the following configuration at the service level under the router property:

{
    "version": 3,
    "extra_config": {
        "router": {
            "max_payload": 1024
        }
    }
}

The configuration above limits all requests to 1KB (1024 bytes)

Limit the maximum request size to an endpoint

When you want to limit the maximum payload you can send to an endpoint, place the flag under the proxy entry of the endpoint. Remember that if you have also set the limit in the router, that limit will kick in first. This is what you need to add to limit an endpoint:

 {
    "endpoint": "/body_size",
    "method":"POST",
    "backend": [
        {
            "url_pattern": "/__debug/body_size"
        }
    ],
    "extra_config":{
        "proxy":{
            "max_payload": 1024
        }
    }
}