How to set socket timeout in Java HTTP Client

Question

We want to migrate all our apache-httpclient-4.x code to java-http-client code to reduce dependencies. While migrating them, i ran into the following issue under java 11:

How to set the socket timeout in Java HTTP Client?

With apache-httpclient-4.x we can set the connection timeout and the socket timeout like this:

DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
int timeout = 5; // seconds
HttpParams httpParams = httpClient.getParams();
httpParams.setParameter(CoreConnectionPNames.CONNECTION_TIMEOUT, timeout * 1000);
httpParams.setParameter(CoreConnectionPNames.SO_TIMEOUT, timeout * 1000);

With java-http-client i can only set the connection timeout like this:

HttpClient httpClient = HttpClient.newBuilder()
                                  .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(5))
                                  .build()

But i found no way to set the socket timeout. Is there any way or an open issue to support that in the future?

Answer 1

You can specify it at the HttpRequest.Builder level via the timeout method:

HttpClient httpClient = HttpClient.newBuilder()
                .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(5))
                .build();

HttpRequest httpRequest = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
                .uri(URI.create("..."))
                .timeout(Duration.ofSeconds(5)) //this
                .build();


httpClient.send(httpRequest, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString());

If you've got connected successfully but not able to receive a response at the desired amount of time, java.net.http.HttpTimeoutException: request timed out will be thrown (in contrast with java.net.http.HttpConnectTimeoutException: HTTP connect timed out which will be thrown if you don't get a successful connection).