How to Set Selenium Python Webdriver Default Timeout

How to set Selenium Python WebDriver default timeout?

In python, the method to create a timeout for a page to load is:

Firefox, Chromedriver and undetected_chromedriver:

driver.set_page_load_timeout(30)

Other:

driver.implicitly_wait(30)

This will throw a TimeoutException whenever the page load takes more than 30 seconds.

How to set the timeout of 'driver.get' for python selenium 3.8.0?

To set the time out for Page Loading you can induce the set_page_load_timeout(seconds).

set_page_load_timeout

Method Details

def set_page_load_timeout(self, time_to_wait):
    """
    Set the amount of time to wait for a page load to complete
    before throwing an error.

Args

time_to_wait: The amount of time to wait

Usage

driver.set_page_load_timeout(3)

Example

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\chromedriver.exe')
driver.set_page_load_timeout(2)
try :
    driver.get("https://www.booking.com/hotel/in/the-taj-mahal-palace-tower.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggJCAlhYSDNiBW5vcmVmaGyIAQGYATG4AQbIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQKSAgF5qAID;sid=338ad58d8e83c71e6aa78c67a2996616;dest_id=-2092174;dest_type=city;dist=0;group_adults=2;hip_dst=1;hpos=1;room1=A%2CA;sb_price_type=total;srfid=ccd41231d2f37b82d695970f081412152a59586aX1;srpvid=c71751e539ea01ce;type=total;ucfs=1&#hotelTmpl")
    print("URL successfully Accessed")
    driver.quit()
except TimeoutException as e:
    print("Page load Timeout Occurred. Quitting !!!")
    driver.quit()

Console Output

Page load Timeout Occurred. Quitting !!!

Documentation

You can find a detailed discussion on pageLoadTimeout here pageLoadTimeout in Selenium not working

Deep Dive

As per Python 3.x if we don't handle the exception the following log messages are observed :

    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.TimeoutException: Message: timeout
  (Session info: chrome=62.0.3202.94)
  (Driver info: chromedriver=2.33.506120 (e3e53437346286c0bc2d2dc9aa4915ba81d9023f),platform=Windows NT 6.2.9200 x86_64)

Handling timeout with Selenium and Python

I can't exactly understand what your code is doing because I have no context for the page you are automating, but I can provide a general structure for how you would accomplish something like this. Here's a simplified version of how I would handle your scenario:

# iterate URL list
for url in url_list:

    # navigate to a URL
    driver.get(url)

    # check something here to test if a link is 'broken' or not
    try: 
        driver.find_element(someLocator)

    # if link is broken, go back
    except TimeoutException:
        driver.back()
        # continue so we can return to beginning of loop
        continue

    # if you reach this point, the link is valid, and you can 'do stuff' on the page

This code navigates to the URL, and performs some check (that you specify) to see if the link is 'broken' or not. We check for broken link by catching the TimeoutException that gets thrown. If the exception is thrown, we navigate to the previous page, then call continue to return to the beginning of the loop, and start over with the next URL.

If we make it through the try / except block, then the URL is valid and we are on the correct page. In this place, you can write your code to scrape the articles or whatever you need to do.

The code the appears after try / except will ONLY be hit if TimeoutException is NOT encountered -- meaning the URL is valid.

The default value of timeouts on selenium webdriver

These three timeouts are managed by the server-side of the Selenium equation. Your script, be it in Java, Python, Ruby, C#, or whatever, is a client that sends commands to a server that lives in the browser. (There may be an intermediary that relays commands to the browser, like Selenium grid. Unfortunately, it is also sometimes called a "server".)

The WebDriver specification, which was derived from Selenium has settled on the following values:

For implicit waits: 0 seconds. This means that if a selenium command does not find an element immediately, it reports immediately, rather than wait until an element is found.
For page loads: 300 seconds.
For script timeouts: 30 seconds.

(The specification gives the values in milliseconds. I've converted them to seconds for ease of reading.)

Selenium now follows the WebDriver specification.

In the past Selenium has used other values for these, however. For instance, the Firefox driver used to define its timeouts like this:

The implicit wait timeout is set to 0 by default. This means that if a command that finds elements does not find anything, it won't wait.
The page load timeout is set to -1 by default. This means that Selenium will wait indefinitely for the page to load.
What Saifur found is not the same as the page load timeout. That's a timeout between the Selenium client and the Selenium server, which is not particularly well explained on the page Saifur found.
The script timeout is set to 0 by default. A comment in the source code explains:

The amount of time, in milliseconds, this session should wait for asynchronous scripts to finish executing. If set to 0, then the timeout will not fire until the next event loop after the script is executed. This will give scripts that employ a 0-based setTimeout to finish.
So even if it set to zero, an asynchronous script can still execute but it has to complete before Selenium's timeout gets a chance to run again.

This is from the code that Selenium uses for Firefox. The other browsers use different code bases but they are supposed to behave consistently, at least with regards to things that are proper to Selenium itself, like these timeouts. So the values and their interpretations should be the same for other browsers too.

How to Set Selenium Python Webdriver Default Timeout