How do I manage timeouts in Requests?

In the Python requests library, managing timeouts is crucial to ensure that your code doesn't hang indefinitely if a server is slow to respond or if there are network issues. The requests library allows you to specify timeouts as a parameter to the request functions (get, post, put, delete, etc.).

Here's how you can manage timeouts:

Setting a Timeout

You can set a timeout by passing a number of seconds to the timeout parameter:

import requests

try:
    response = requests.get('https://example.com', timeout=5)  # Timeout is 5 seconds
except requests.Timeout:
    print('The request timed out')
except requests.RequestException as e:
    print('An error occurred:', e)

In this example, if the server has not sent a response within 5 seconds, a requests.Timeout exception will be raised.

Timeout for Connect and Read

The timeout parameter can also be a tuple (connect_timeout, read_timeout):

import requests

try:
    # Connect timeout is 3 seconds, read timeout is 5 seconds
    response = requests.get('https://example.com', timeout=(3, 5))
except requests.Timeout:
    print('The request timed out')
except requests.RequestException as e:
    print('An error occurred:', e)

Here, connect_timeout is the number of seconds Requests will wait for your client to establish a connection to a server, and read_timeout is the number of seconds the client will wait for the server to send a response.

Infinite Timeout

If you don't set a timeout, your request could potentially hang indefinitely. By default, requests does not set a timeout; unless you explicitly specify one, there will be no timeout:

import requests

# No timeout is specified
response = requests.get('https://example.com')

Global Timeout Default

If you want to set a global default timeout for all requests in your application, you can subclass requests.Session and override the request method:

import requests

class TimeoutSession(requests.Session):
    def request(self, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs.setdefault('timeout', 5)  # Set a default timeout for all requests
        return super().request(*args, **kwargs)

session = TimeoutSession()
response = session.get('https://example.com')  # This request will use the default timeout of 5 seconds

Best Practices

• Always set a timeout. The risk of leaving your code hanging indefinitely is usually not acceptable in a production environment.
• Choose a reasonable timeout value based on your specific use case. For example, if you're making requests to a service that you know is quick, a shorter timeout could be appropriate.
• Handle exceptions properly. Make sure to catch requests.Timeout errors to handle them gracefully in your code.

Keep in mind that some requests might take longer due to large file transfers or slow server responses. In such cases, you might need to adjust your timeout settings accordingly.