How to retry urllib2.request when fails?

python decorator urllib2 urllib3
iTayb picture iTayb · Feb 25, 2012 · Viewed 28.2k times · Source

When urllib2.request reaches timeout, a urllib2.URLError exception is raised. What is the pythonic way to retry establishing a connection?

Answer

jterrace picture jterrace · Feb 25, 2012

I would use a retry decorator. There are other ones out there, but this one works pretty well. Here's how you can use it:

@retry(urllib2.URLError, tries=4, delay=3, backoff=2)
def urlopen_with_retry():
    return urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com")

This will retry the function if URLError is raised. Check the link above for documentation on the parameters, but basically it will retry a maximum of 4 times, with an exponential backoff delay doubling each time, e.g. 3 seconds, 6 seconds, 12 seconds.

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