In 2023, most other answers are incorrect. You will not achieve what you want.
TL;DR - the proper solution, condensed
import requests, sys, time
TOTAL_TIMEOUT = 10
def trace_function(frame, event, arg):
if time.time() - start > TOTAL_TIMEOUT:
raise Exception('Timed out!')
return trace_function
start = time.time()
sys.settrace(trace_function)
try:
res = requests.get('http://localhost:8080', timeout=(3, 6))
except:
raise
finally:
sys.settrace(None)
Read the explanation to understand why!
Despite all the answers, I believe that this thread still lacks a proper solution and no existing answer presents a reasonable way to do something which should be simple and obvious.
Let's start by saying that as of 2023, there is still absolutely no way to do it properly with requests alone. It is a concious design decision by the library's developers.
Solutions utilizing the timeout parameter simply do not accomplish what they intend to do. The fact that it "seems" to work at the first glance is purely incidental:
The timeout parameter has absolutely nothing to do with the total execution time of the request. It merely controls the maximum amount of time that can pass before underlying socket receives any data. With an example timeout of 5 seconds, server can just as well send 1 byte of data every 4 seconds and it will be perfectly okay, but won't help you very much.
Answers with stream and iter_content are somewhat better, but they still do not cover everything in a request. You do not actually receive anything from iter_content until after response headers are sent, which falls under the same issue - even if you use 1 byte as a chunk size for iter_content, reading full response headers could take a totally arbitrary amount of time and you can never actually get to the point in which you read any response body from iter_content.
Here are some examples that completely break both timeout and stream-based approach. Try them all. They all hang indefinitely, no matter which method you use.
server.py
import socket
import time
server = socket.socket()
server.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, True)
server.bind(('127.0.0.1', 8080))
server.listen()
while True:
try:
sock, addr = server.accept()
print('Connection from', addr)
sock.send(b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n')
# Send some garbage headers very slowly but steadily.
# Never actually complete the response.
while True:
sock.send(b'a')
time.sleep(1)
except:
pass
demo1.py
import requests
requests.get('http://localhost:8080')
demo2.py
import requests
requests.get('http://localhost:8080', timeout=5)
demo3.py
import requests
requests.get('http://localhost:8080', timeout=(5, 5))
demo4.py
import requests
with requests.get('http://localhost:8080', timeout=(5, 5), stream=True) as res:
for chunk in res.iter_content(1):
break
The proper solution
My approach utilizes Python's sys.settrace function. It is dead simple. You do not need to use any external libraries or turn your code upside down. Unlike most other answers, this actually guarantees that the code executes in specified time. Be aware that you still need to specify the timeout parameter, as settrace only concerns Python code. Actual socket reads are external syscalls which are not covered by settrace, but are covered by the timeout parameter. Due to this fact, the exact time limit is not TOTAL_TIMEOUT, but a value which is explained in comments below.
import requests
import sys
import time
# This function serves as a "hook" that executes for each Python statement
# down the road. There may be some performance penalty, but as downloading
# a webpage is mostly I/O bound, it's not going to be significant.
def trace_function(frame, event, arg):
if time.time() - start > TOTAL_TIMEOUT:
raise Exception('Timed out!') # Use whatever exception you consider appropriate.
return trace_function
# The following code will terminate at most after TOTAL_TIMEOUT + the highest
# value specified in `timeout` parameter of `requests.get`.
# In this case 10 + 6 = 16 seconds.
# For most cases though, it's gonna terminate no later than TOTAL_TIMEOUT.
TOTAL_TIMEOUT = 10
start = time.time()
sys.settrace(trace_function)
try:
res = requests.get('http://localhost:8080', timeout=(3, 6)) # Use whatever timeout values you consider appropriate.
except:
raise
finally:
sys.settrace(None) # Remove the time constraint and continue normally.
# Do something with the response
That's it!
