Question

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

Answer 1

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.