requests: max-retries-exceeded exceptions are confusing

hi, for example:

>>> requests.get('http://localhost:1111')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "requests/api.py", line 55, in get
    return request('get', url, **kwargs)
  File "requests/api.py", line 44, in request
    return session.request(method=method, url=url, **kwargs)
  File "requests/sessions.py", line 312, in request
    resp = self.send(prep, **send_kwargs)
  File "requests/sessions.py", line 413, in send
    r = adapter.send(request, **kwargs)
  File "requests/adapters.py", line 223, in send
    raise ConnectionError(e)
requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: HTTPConnectionPool(host='localhost', port=1111): Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by <class 'socket.error'>: [Errno 61] Connection refused)

(assuming nothing is listening on port 1111)

the exception says “Max retries exceeded”. i found this confusing because i did not specify any retry-related params. in fact, i am unable to find any documentation about specifying the retry-count. after going through the code, it seems that urllib3 is the underlying transport, and it is called with max_retries=0 (so in fact there are no retries). and requests simply wraps the exception. so it is understandable, but it confuses the end-user (end-developer)? i think something better should be done here, especially considering that it is very easy to get this error.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 11 years ago
Reactions: 18
Comments: 39 (18 by maintainers)

Links to this issue

python - Max retries exceeded with URL in requests - Stack Overflow

Most upvoted comments

I agree this is quite confusing. Requests never retries (it sets the retries=0 for urllib3’s HTTPConnectionPool), so the error would be much more obvious without the HTTPConnectionPool/MaxRetryError stuff. I didn’t realize requests used urllib3 till just now, when I had to dive into the source code of both libraries to help me figure out how many retries it was doing:

ConnectionError(MaxRetryError("HTTPSConnectionPool(host='api.venere.com', port=443): \
    Max retries exceeded with url: /xhi-1.0/services/XHI_HotelAvail.json (\
    Caused by <class 'socket.error'>: [Errno 10054] \
    An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host)",),)

Ideally the exception would just look something like this:

ConnectionError(<class 'socket.error'>: [Errno 10054] \
    An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host))

benhoyt on Apr 8, 2013