How to properly handle cURL timeouts and implement retries in PHP when making API requests

PHP
1

I’m using cURL in PHP to fetch data from an external API. Sometimes the request times out or fails due to a temporary network issue. I want to set a timeout and also retry the request a few times before giving up.

What’s the best way to implement this in a clean and reliable way?
Should I use CURLOPT_TIMEOUT or CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, or both?
Also, how can I properly loop the retries while avoiding infinite loops or bad practices?

Sample code would be really helpful!

2

Been a long time since i did anything with cURL in PHP, but sniffing curl_errno should be the answer?

3

To handle timeouts and retries in cURL with PHP, you can use both CURLOPT_TIMEOUT and CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT to control the overall timeout and connection timeout. Here’s an example implementation that retries the request up to 3 times before giving up:

<?php
function fetch_data_with_retries($url, $max_retries = 3) {
    $attempt = 0;
    $timeout = 10;  // seconds
    $connect_timeout = 5;  // seconds
    
    while ($attempt < $max_retries) {
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout); // Total timeout
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $connect_timeout); // Connection timeout
        $response = curl_exec($ch);
        
        if ($response === false) {
            $attempt++;
            echo "Attempt $attempt failed. Retrying...\n";
            sleep(2); // Optional: Sleep between retries
        } else {
            curl_close($ch);
            return $response;
        }
    }
    echo "All attempts failed.\n";
    curl_close($ch);
    return null; // Return null if all retries fail
}

$response = fetch_data_with_retries("https://api.example.com/data");
if ($response) {
    echo "Data fetched successfully!";
} else {
    echo "Failed to fetch data after retries.";
}
?>
4

Your AI’s doing a bit more echoing than it needed to, and should probably be echoing the actual error associated with the failure rather than generic statements.
Also, the echo’s been structured for a CLI implementation.