Python Requests with retries

Note to self

Thanks a ton to Peter Bengtsson

This will setup up a function which as a drop-in replacement to the requests.get call can let you make requests with retries.

import requests
from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from requests.packages.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

Some testing is always good.

t0 = time.time()
try:
    response = requests_retry_session().get(
        'http://httpbin.org/status/500',
    )
except Exception as x:
    print('It failed :(', x.__class__.__name__)
else:
    print('It eventually worked', response.status_code)
finally:
    t1 = time.time()
    print('Took', t1 - t0, 'seconds')

Intuition

The algorithm for that backoff is documented here:
A backoff factor to apply between attempts after the second try (most errors are resolved immediately by a second try without a delay). urllib3 will sleep for: {backoff factor} * (2 ^ ({number of total retries} - 1)) seconds. If the backoff_factor is 0.1, then sleep() will sleep for [0.0s, 0.2s, 0.4s, ...] between retries. It will never be longer than Retry.BACKOFF_MAX. By default, backoff is disabled (set to 0).