I needed an easy way to simulate timeout when connected to a REST API. As part of the flow of an application I am working on I need to send events to our data platform, and blocking the production flow ‘just’ to send an event in case of timeout is not ideal, and I needed a way to test this.

I know there are a few options:

• Connecting to a ‘well known’ timing out url, as google.com:81, but this is very antisocial
• Adding my own firewall rule to DROP connection, but this is a lot of work (yes, I am very very lazy and I would need to look up the iptables syntax)
• Connecting to a non routable IP, like 10.255.255.1 or 10.0.0.0

All those options are fine (except the first one, which although technically valid is very rude and no guaranteed to stay), but they all give indefinite non configurable timeouts.

I thus wrote a small python script, without dependencies, which just listens to a port and makes the connection wait a configurable amount of seconds before either closing the connection, either returning a valid HTTP response.

Its usage is very simple:

usage: timeout.py [-h] [--http] [--port PORT] [--timeout TIMEOUT]

Timeout Server.

optional arguments:
 -h, --help show this help message and exit
 --http, -w if true return a valid http 204 response.
 --port PORT, -p PORT Port to listen to. Default 7000.
 --timeout TIMEOUT, -t TIMEOUT
 Timeout in seconds before answering/closing. Default
 5.

For instance, to wait 2 seconds before giving an http answer:

./timeout.py -w -t2

Would give you following output if a client connects to it:

./timeout.py -w -t2
Listening, waiting for connection...
Connected! Timing out after 2 seconds...
Processing complete.
Returning http 204 response.
Closing connection.

Listening, waiting for connection...

This is the full script, which you can find on github as well:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import argparse
import socket
import time


# Make the TimeoutServer a bit more user friendly by giving 3 options:
# --http/-w to return a valid http response
# --port/-p to define the port to listen to (7000)
# --timeout/-t to define the timeout delay (5)

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Timeout Server.')
parser.add_argument('--http', '-w', default=False, dest='http', action='store_true',
                    help='if true return a valid http 204 response.')
parser.add_argument('--port', '-p', type=int, default=7000, dest='port',
                    help='Port to listen to. Default 7000.')
parser.add_argument('--timeout', '-t', type=int, default=5, dest='timeout',
                    help='Timeout in seconds before answering/closing. Default 5.')
args = parser.parse_args()


# Creates a standard socket and listen to incoming connections
# See https://docs.python.org/2/howto/sockets.html for more info
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind(('127.0.0.1', args.port))
s.listen(5)  # See doc for the explanation of 5. This is a usual value.

while True:
    print("Listening, waiting for connection...")
    (clientsocket, address) = s.accept()
    print("Connected! Timing out after {} seconds...".format(args.timeout))
    time.sleep(args.timeout)
    print('Processing complete.')

    if args.http:
        print("Returning http 204 response.")
        clientsocket.send(
            'HTTP/1.1 204 OK\n'
            #'Date: {0}\n'.format(time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", time.localtime())
            'Server: Timeout-Server\n'
            'Connection: close\n\n'  # signals no more data to be sent)
        )

    print("Closing connection.\n")
    clientsocket.close()