Hardening Laravel Vapor with Managed Firewall Protection

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you should be familiar with the Laravel framework and have a basic understanding of YAML configuration. You will also need a project already provisioned on the Vapor platform.

Key Libraries & Tools

• Laravel Vapor: A serverless deployment platform for Laravel.
• Vapor CLI: The command-line interface used to deploy and manage environments.
• Guzzle: A PHP HTTP client often used by bots or scripts to make requests.

Code Walkthrough

To enable the firewall, modify your vapor.yml file. This configuration acts as the blueprint for your environment's security rules.

Setting Rate Limits

Add a firewall section to your environment configuration to limit how many requests a single IP can make within a five-minute window.

id: 1
name: my-app
environments:
    production:
        firewall:
            rate_limit: 100

When a source exceeds 100 requests in 5 minutes, Vapor automatically blocks subsequent attempts, protecting your database and compute resources from exhaustion.

Implementing Bot Control

You can further refine traffic by blocking specific categories of automated agents. This is particularly useful for internal APIs that shouldn't be indexed by search engines.

firewall:
    bot_control:
        - http_libraries
        - search_engines

Syntax Notes

The firewall key must sit under the specific environment block (e.g., production or staging). The bot_control option accepts a list of predefined categories. Always ensure your YAML indentation is correct, as malformed files will cause deployment failures.

Practical Examples

A common use case involves blocking http_libraries. If you run a script using Guzzle or curl against an endpoint protected with this rule, the firewall will reject the traffic immediately. This effectively stops simple scraping scripts from impacting your app.

Tips & Gotchas

• Deployment Required: Changes to vapor.yml do not take effect until you run vapor deploy.
• Monitoring: Check your environment metrics after enabling these rules. Vapor provides visual feedback on how many requests the firewall has successfully blocked.
• Cooldown: Rate-limited IPs are generally blocked for the remainder of the five-minute sliding window.