How to handle timeouts with httplib (python 2.6)?

python httplib
ryonlife picture ryonlife · Nov 2, 2010 · Viewed 19k times · Source

I'm using httplib to access an api over https and need to build in exception handling in the event that the api is down.

Here's an example connection:

connection = httplib.HTTPSConnection('non-existent-api.com', timeout=1)
connection.request('POST', '/request.api', xml, headers={'Content-Type': 'text/xml'})
response = connection.getresponse()

This should timeout, so I was expecting an exception to be raised, and response.read() just returns an empty string.

How can I know if there was a timeout? Even better, what's the best way to gracefully handle the problem of a 3rd-party api being down?

Answer

mouad picture mouad · Nov 2, 2010

Even better, what's the best way to gracefully handle the problem of a 3rd-party api being down?

what's mean API is down , API return http 404 , 500 ...

or you mean when the API can't be reachable ?

first of all i don't think you can know if a web service in general is down before trying to access it so i will recommend for first one you can do like this:

import httplib

conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('www.google.com')  # I used here HTTP not HTTPS for simplify
conn.request('HEAD', '/')  # Just send a HTTP HEAD request 
res = conn.getresponse()

if res.status == 200:
   print "ok"
else:
   print "problem : the query returned %s because %s" % (res.status, res.reason)

and for checking if the API is not reachable i think you will be better doing a try catch: 

import httplib
import socket

try:
   # I don't think you need the timeout unless you want to also calculate the response time ...
   conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection('www.google.com') 
   conn.connect()
except (httplib.HTTPException, socket.error) as ex:
   print "Error: %s" % ex

You can mix the two ways if you want something more general ,Hope this will help

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