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Feature Request: Add Configurable Network Timeouts to HTTP Clients #18

@Deadpool2000

Description

@Deadpool2000

The Problem

By default, the underlying httpx HTTP library used by this SDK applies a strict 5-second timeout to all network requests.

If an API method takes longer than 5 seconds to process-for example, generating a large PDF file, querying a heavy dataset, or doing operations over a slow network connection-the SDK will unexpectedly crash with a TimeoutException.

Currently, the only way for developers to fix this is to understand how httpx works underneath, build a custom httpx.Client() object with a custom timeout, and explicitly pass it into our SDK upon initialization. This is a bit too much boilerplate work for such a common requirement.

Proposed Solution

We should add a built-in timeout parameter directly into the initialization methods of all our clients (Client, AsyncClient, OauthClient, and AsyncOauthClient), giving it a safer default limit of 30.0 seconds.

Expected behavior:

# Before: Developers had to do all this
import httpx
custom_client = httpx.Client(timeout=60.0)
client = Client(token="abc", client=custom_client)

# After: Simple, clean SDK syntax
client = Client(token="abc", timeout=60.0)

Acceptance Criteria

  • Add timeout: float = 30.0 to Client and AsyncClient.
  • Add timeout: float = 30.0 to OauthClient and AsyncOauthClient.
  • Pass this parameter into the underlying httpx client natively.
  • Ensure full backward compatibility—if a user manually passes a custom httpx client, their settings are preserved and not overridden.
  • Update README.md and PyPI docs with code examples showing how to configure the timeout.
  • Verify all existing unit tests pass cleanly.

Why this matters / Benefits

  • Smarter Defaults: Bumping the default timeout from 5 to 30 seconds prevents the SDK from crashing during heavier, perfectly valid API workloads.
  • Better Developer Experience (DX): Allows users to configure timeouts cleanly in one line of code without needing to learn the intricacies of the underlying httpx library.

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