Retry and failure handling in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Retry and Failure Handling in REST API Calls

📖 Scenario: You are building a small program that calls a REST API to get the current weather for a city. Sometimes the API might fail or be slow, so you want to try again a few times before giving up.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that tries to get data from a REST API with retry attempts and handles failure gracefully.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable with the API URL

Create a variable for maximum retry attempts

Write a loop to retry the API call up to the maximum attempts

Print the API response if successful or an error message if all attempts fail

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Retrying API calls is common when working with web services that might be slow or temporarily unavailable.

💼 Career

Many software jobs require handling network errors and making programs more reliable by retrying failed requests.

1

Set up the API URL

Create a variable called api_url and set it to the string "https://api.example.com/weather?city=London".

Rest API

# Create the API URL variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a string variable to store the full API URL.

2

Set the maximum retry attempts

Create a variable called max_retries and set it to the integer 3.

Rest API

api_url = "https://api.example.com/weather?city=London"
# Create the max_retries variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an integer variable to store how many times to retry.

3

Write the retry loop with failure handling

Write a for loop using attempt in range(max_retries). Inside the loop, use a try block to call requests.get(api_url) and store the result in response. If response.status_code is 200, break the loop. If an exception occurs, catch it with except Exception as e and continue to the next attempt.

Rest API

api_url = "https://api.example.com/weather?city=London"
max_retries = 3

# Write a retry loop to call the API
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop with try-except inside to retry the API call.

4

Print the result or failure message

Add response = None right after the max_retries line (before the loop). After the loop, use an if statement to check if response is not None and response.status_code == 200. If yes, print response.text. Otherwise, print "Failed to get data after 3 attempts.".

Rest API

import requests

api_url = "https://api.example.com/weather?city=London"
max_retries = 3

# Add response = None here, then print the API response text if successful, else print failure message after the loop
for attempt in range(max_retries):
    try:
        response = requests.get(api_url)
        if response.status_code == 200:
            break
    except Exception as e:
        continue

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Initialize response = None before the loop. Check both that response is not None and status code is 200 before printing the text.