Nginx - how to limit requests by User Agent

gistfile1.txt

 http {

     map $http_user_agent $limit_bots {
         default '';
         ~*(google|bing|yandex|msnbot) $binary_remote_addr;
     }

     limit_req_zone $limit_bots zone=bots:10m rate=1r/m;

     server {
         location / {
             limit_req zone=bots burst=5 nodelay;
         }
     }
 }

This sounds promising for what I'm looking to do - it appears as if you will map the value of $limit_bots based on the value of the $http_user_agent. That is if the $http_user_agent is google, bing, yandex, or msnbot set the value of $limit_bots to be the binary of the IP address. What if, though, you want different rate limiting that takes into account both the IP address and the $http_user_agent?

One way of doing IP address and http_user_agent could be to put $binary_remote_addr and $http_user_agent into 1 variable for example "10.1.1.10 google" and use that as the key

hope this helps

this is what I did, and it works. had to define a $geo_whitelist variable FIRST, and then reuse that variable in the map {} for user agent (as the default value)

# ref: http://serverfault.com/questions/177461/how-to-rate-limit-in-nginx-but-including-excluding-certain-ip-addresses
# whitelisted IP ranges - will not have limits applied
geo $geo_whitelist {
  default 0;
  1.2.3.4 1;
  2.3.4.5/24 1;
}

# whitelisted user agents - will not have limits applied
map $http_user_agent $whitelist {
  default $geo_whitelist;
  ~*(google) 1;
}

# if whitelist is 0, put the binary IP address in $limit so the rate limiting has something to use
map $whitelist $limit {
  0 $binary_remote_addr;
  1 "";
}

limit_req_zone $limit zone=perip:30m rate=1r/s;

thanks mike503 this help a lot :D