429 Too Many Requests in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Handling 429 Too Many Requests in REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API client that calls a web service. Sometimes, the server limits how many requests you can send in a short time. When you send too many requests, the server responds with a 429 Too Many Requests status code. Your task is to handle this response properly by waiting and retrying the request.

🎯 Goal: Create a Python program that makes a request to a web API. If the server responds with 429 Too Many Requests, the program should wait for a specified time and then retry the request once.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable called url with the API endpoint string 'https://api.example.com/data'.

Create a variable called retry_wait with the integer value 5 representing seconds to wait before retry.

Write code to send a GET request to url using the requests library.

If the response status code is 429, wait for retry_wait seconds and send the request again.

Print 'Success' if the final response status code is 200, otherwise print 'Failed with status code: X' where X is the status code.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Many web APIs limit how often you can send requests to prevent overload. Handling 429 responses properly helps your program be polite and avoid being blocked.

💼 Career

Understanding how to handle rate limits and retry logic is important for backend developers, API consumers, and anyone working with web services.

1

Set up the API endpoint URL

Create a variable called url and set it to the string 'https://api.example.com/data'.

Rest API

# Create the API endpoint URL
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment statement to create the url variable.

2

Set the retry wait time

Create a variable called retry_wait and set it to the integer 5 to represent seconds to wait before retrying.

Rest API

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
# Set the retry wait time in seconds
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment statement to create the retry_wait variable.

3

Send the request and handle 429 status

Import the requests and time modules. Send a GET request to url and store the response in a variable called response. If response.status_code is 429, use time.sleep(retry_wait) to wait, then send the GET request again and update response.

Rest API

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
retry_wait = 5
# Import requests and time modules
# Send GET request and handle 429 status
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use requests.get(url) to send the request. Use an if statement to check the status code. Use time.sleep() to wait.

4

Print the final result

Write an if statement to check if response.status_code is 200. If yes, print 'Success'. Otherwise, print 'Failed with status code: ' followed by the actual status code.

Rest API

import requests
import time

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
retry_wait = 5

response = requests.get(url)
if response.status_code == 429:
    time.sleep(retry_wait)
    response = requests.get(url)

# Print success or failure message
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() with an if statement to show the correct message.