Is there a way to globally override requests' timeout setting?

The simplest way is to "shim" the session's request function:

import requests
import functools

s = requests.Session()
s.request = functools.partial(s.request, timeout=3)

# now all get, post, head etc requests should timeout after 3 seconds
# following will fail
s.get('https://httpbin.org/delay/6')

# we can still pass higher timeout when needed
# following will succeed
s.get('https://httpbin.org/delay/6', timeout=7)

Instead you could inherit the requests.Session class and rewrite request function, like this.

HTTP_TIMEOUT = 30

class TimeoutRequestsSession(requests.Session):
    def request(self, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs.setdefault('timeout', HTTP_TIMEOUT)
        return super(TimeoutRequestsSession, self).request(*args, **kwargs)

session = TimeoutRequestsSession()
session.get('https://www.google.com') # connection timeout is default 30s

Unfortunately, looking at the code, there is no possibility to set a global default value. I was kinda surprised by that, as I would expect that to be quite common use case. If you start a feature request, please let me know (e.g. in comments to this post).

The reason for that is that methods like get(...), post(...), etc are all just thin wrappers over Session.request(...) method (requests.get(...) creates new one-shot session, just for a single request). That method takes timeout as argument, and does not inspect Session internals for a value if there is no timeout argument, so you always have to put it there manually, like 2ps proposed in his answer.

Sources:

Revised on master on 31.08.2020. Line numbers have changed, but methods stayed the same. The answer stays the same.

• requests/__init__.py - import API to package scope, to provide requests.get(...)-like utilities
• requests.api - API module that is imported in point above; usess one-shot sessions
• requests.sessions - Session implementation
  • line 337 starts Session class
  • line 463 starts request(...) method
  • line 526 actually uses timeout parameter
  • line 534 start get(...) method

PS. See this pull request. Disclaimer: it's mine.