Is there a way to automatically handle retries with Requests?

Yes, there's a way to automatically handle retries with the Requests library in Python. The Requests library itself does not provide a built-in mechanism for automatic retries, but this functionality can be achieved by using a third-party package called urllib3, which Requests uses under the hood.

The urllib3 package has a Retry class that can be configured to handle various conditions for retries. You can use this in conjunction with a Session object from Requests to handle retries automatically.

Here's an example of how to configure automatic retries with Requests:

import requests
from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from urllib3.util.retry import Retry

def requests_retry_session(
    retries=3,
    backoff_factor=0.3,
    status_forcelist=(500, 502, 504),
    session=None,
):
    session = session or requests.Session()
    retry = Retry(
        total=retries,
        read=retries,
        connect=retries,
        backoff_factor=backoff_factor,
        status_forcelist=status_forcelist,
    )
    adapter = HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retry)
    session.mount('http://', adapter)
    session.mount('https://', adapter)
    return session

try:
    response = requests_retry_session().get('https://httpbin.org/status/500')
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as e:
    print(f'HTTP error: {e}')
except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as e:
    print(f'Connection error: {e}')
except requests.exceptions.Timeout as e:
    print(f'Timeout error: {e}')
else:
    print('Success!')

# Note: The 'httpbin' service is an online tool that lets you test HTTP requests.

In this code snippet:

• retries: The total number of retry attempts.
• backoff_factor: A backoff factor to apply between attempts after the second try (most of the time, an exponential backoff strategy is used).
• status_forcelist: A set of HTTP status codes that we force to retry upon. In this case, we retry on server-side errors (500, 502, 504).

The Retry class provided by urllib3 allows you to specify different retry conditions such as the maximum number of retries, retry on certain status codes, and a backoff factor.

It's also worth mentioning that while this approach makes it easier to handle retries for transient issues, you should take care not to abuse retries, especially when making requests to third-party services, as this could potentially violate usage policies or lead to rate-limiting. Always be respectful of the services you interact with and handle errors gracefully.