Add info about rate limits

[thewbuk]

Hi,

Just stumbled across this gem, and thinking about playing around with it. Is it possible to add information regarding rate limits/other restrictions so developers are aware of what to expect?

[mrhyde]

@thewbuk From my experience, Ryanair's API doesn't have rate limits - I've never hit any. But to keep things friendly, this client throttle requests to 120 per minute to ensure responsible usage.

[MichalCiesliczka]

@mrhyde Unfortunately I've hit the rate limit (I guess), which returns 409 after some time.
Hard to tell exact numbers now (would need to prepare better tests), but currently I was hitting like 12 requests every 2-3 seconds (which obviously is over 120/minute, but I believe debounce handles that anyway?) and after ~60 requests it started to receive errors only.

Failing request: flights.getAvailable

After this error every request to getAvailable results in 409 for some time (cannot tell for sure how long is ban).
Error occurs even when I change the cookie content to the one copied from Ryanair page on my machine, so it's probably per IP? Guessing here now.

I feel 409 sounds strange for rate limiting, but I cannot see any other explanation for this error.

Error message and code from the response:

HTTPError: Response code 409 (Conflict)
    at Request.<anonymous> (file:///Users/[...]/node_modules/got/dist/source/as-promise/index.js:92:42)
    at Object.onceWrapper (node:events:633:26)
    at Request.emit (node:events:530:35)
    at Request._onResponseBase (file:///Users/[...]/node_modules/got/dist/source/core/index.js:609:22)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:95:5)
    at async Request._onResponse(file:///Users/[...]/node_modules/got/dist/source/core/index.js:649:13)

{
  code: 'ERR_NON_2XX_3XX_RESPONSE',
  [cause]: {}
}

[mrhyde]

Yeah, since it's not a public API this kind of stuff is expected unfortunately. The 409 is weird though - usually you'd see 429 for rate limiting, so might be some anti-bot protection or just Ryanair being Ryanair.
I need to run some tests myself to figure out the exact thresholds and see if there's anything I can do on the library side - maybe add some built-in rate limiting or smarter retry logic.
For now, the only workaround I can suggest is using proxies. Support for that was added in a recent commit and should be published as a new version soon. Won't help with switching proxies on the fly during runtime though, so I'll need to think about that.
If you can share roughly how many routes/dates you were querying that might help me reproduce it on my end.

[MichalCiesliczka]

Sorry, been busy before annual time off 😅

Ryanair being Ryanair.

Yeah :D
I've encountered this error while working on a bigger app, so wanted to test it in isolation. Told AI to build this tool that search between one origin and multiple destinations for all flights in a time range (iterating every week). Here's gist with hardcoded data so if you run node index.js it'll do the search (which most probably will end up with 409)
However if you want to test it by yourself here are the routes and dates:

origin: NRN
destinations: 'AGP,ALC,OVD,TPS,TFS,SVQ,REU,PMI,IBZ,GRO,FUE,CDT'
date start: '2026-02-19' (so I've set start date to like 3 days after that (to catch flex dates) and then iterate adding 7 days untill date end was reached)
date end: '2026-05-12'