pto 0.0.4

Timeouts for arbitrary Python functions.

Easy timeouts for Python

PTO is an MIT-licensed library to make it easy to impose time limits on the runtime of a function that doesn’t expose that functionality itself. I was inspired by a need to prevent a scheduled job from running too long on a platform where I was paying by the hour. Maybe you just need to wrap a flaky network call. Either way, it’s as simple as:

>>> from pto import timeout
>>> @timeout(30)
>>> def slow_func():
...     while True:
...         pass
...
>>> slow_func()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<string>", line 2, in foo
  File "pto.py", line 65, in _timeout
    result = f(*args, **kwargs)
  File "<stdin>", line 3, in slow_func
  File "pto.py", line 57, in handle_timeout
    raise TimedOutException
pto.TimedOutException: u'Timed Out'

Inspiration

I was inspired to do this by Chris Wright’s recipe. I liked the recipe, but I got tired of copying and pasting it, and I didn’t like that the decorator didn’t preserve the signature, docstring, etc.

Caveats

This only works on Unix-like platforms. Sorry, Windows users. I’d love to support Windows, but the secret sauce (signal.alarm from the std lib) doesn’t work on Windows.

Installation

To install PTO, simply:

$ pip install pto

Or, if you absolutely must:

$ easy_install pto

But, you really shouldn’t do that.

History

0.0.4 (2013-03-13)

• Embed license on PyPI page.

0.0.3 (2013-03-13)

• First version that pip can actually install.

0.0.2 (2013-03-12)

• First draft

0.0.1 (2013-03-11)

• Conception