Making Python Requests Without Timeout

When making HTTP requests in Python using the requests library, timeouts are set by default to prevent requests from running indefinitely. However, sometimes you may want to intentionally make a request without any timeout.

Why Remove the Timeout?

There are a few reasons why you may want to remove the timeout on a request:

Removing the timeout introduces the risk of requests getting stuck, so only do this if you understand the tradeoffs.

Setting timeout=None

To make a request without timeout, you simply need to set the timeout parameter to None when creating the request:

import requests

response = requests.get('http://example.com/report', timeout=None)
print(response.status_code)

You can also set this at the session level to apply the setting to all requests made with that session:

session = requests.Session()
session.timeout = None 

response = session.get('http://example.com/report')

Other Considerations

By understanding the tradeoffs and being careful about where you remove timeouts, you can use this approach to let long requests run to completion when needed in Python.