HTTP Retry Session

Use this skill when a script makes outbound HTTP calls and a single transient failure (a 429, a 503, a dropped connection) should not crash the run - and a slow endpoint should never hang it forever. It wires a requests.Session with a urllib3 Retry policy (backoff + status-forcelist + honored Retry-After) and a TimeoutSession subclass that applies a default connect/read timeout to every request unless overridden.

When to invoke

• User says: "add retries to my requests", "handle 429s", "set a timeout on these calls", "the scraper hangs on a slow URL".
• Code in the conversation calls requests.get/post bare, with no retry policy and no timeout.

When NOT to invoke

• A single fire-and-forget call where a failure should fail loudly and immediately.
• You need full async concurrency - reach for httpx/aiohttp with their own retry/timeout setup instead.

Concrete example

User input:

My API client randomly dies on 429s and once hung for ten minutes. Make it resilient.

Output:

# Copy assets/session.py into your project, then:
from session import make_session

# BYO base URL via env or config; nothing target-specific is hardcoded.
session = make_session(total_retries=4, backoff_factor=0.5, timeout=(3.05, 30))

resp = session.get("https://api.example.com/v1/items", params={"page": 1})
resp.raise_for_status()        # retries already exhausted 429/5xx by here
data = resp.json()

Every call now retries idempotent methods on 429/500/502/503/504 with exponential backoff (and respects a Retry-After header), and applies a (connect, read) timeout so no request hangs indefinitely.

Pattern to apply

1. Mount one HTTPAdapter with a Retry on both http:// and https://; reuse the session for connection pooling.
2. Put 429 and 5xx in status_forcelist; set respect_retry_after_header=True so the server's pacing wins.
3. Set backoff_factor so waits grow exponentially (0.5 -> ~0.5s, 1s, 2s, 4s); cap total retries.
4. Apply a default (connect, read) timeout to every request - never call without one, that is what hangs.
5. Keep retries to idempotent methods (allowed_methods); do not silently retry a non-idempotent POST.

Reference: assets/session.py.

Source

Distilled from production use across the author's automation projects. v1.0.0. See also: [[proxy-rotator]], [[rate-limit-budget]], [[webhook-receiver]].

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