How do you set a timeout in Python's gRPC Library

timeout is an optional keyword parameter on RPC invocation so you should change

health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping)

to

health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping, timeout=my_timeout_in_seconds)

.

You may also want to catch and handle timeouts differently than other errors. Sadly the documentation is not quite good on this topic, so here's what you have:

try:
    health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping, timeout=my_timeout_in_seconds)
except grpc.RpcError as e:
    e.details()
    status_code = e.code()
    status_code.name
    status_code.value

Timeout will return DEADLINE_EXCEEDED status_code.value.

To define a timeout on client side, add an optional parameter timeout=<timeout in seconds> when you invoke a service function;

channel = grpc.insecure_channel(...)
stub = my_service_pb2_grpc.MyServiceStub(channel)
request = my_service_pb2.DoSomethingRequest(data='this is my data')
response = stub.DoSomething(request, timeout=0.5)

Note a timeout situation will raise an exception