Timeout a file download with Python urllib?
Question: Python beginner here. I want to be able to timeout my download of a video file
if the process takes longer than 500 seconds.

    
    
    import urllib
    try:
       urllib.urlretrieve ("http://www.videoURL.mp4", "filename.mp4")
    except Exception as e:
       print("error")
    

How do I amend my code to make that happen?


Answer: Better way is to use `requests` so you can stream the results and easily check
for timeouts:

    
    
    import requests
    
    # Make the actual request, set the timeout for no data to 10 seconds and enable streaming responses so we don't have to keep the large files in memory
    request = requests.get('http://www.videoURL.mp4', timeout=10, stream=True)
    
    # Open the output file and make sure we write in binary mode
    with open('filename.mp4', 'wb') as fh:
        # Walk through the request response in chunks of 1024 * 1024 bytes, so 1MiB
        for chunk in request.iter_content(1024 * 1024):
            # Write the chunk to the file
            fh.write(chunk)
            # Optionally we can check here if the download is taking too long
    

