Spring RestTemplate timeout

This question is the first link for a Spring Boot search, therefore, would be great to put here the solution recommended in the official documentation. Spring Boot has its own convenience bean RestTemplateBuilder:

@Bean
public RestTemplate restTemplate(
        RestTemplateBuilder restTemplateBuilder) {

    return restTemplateBuilder
            .setConnectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(500))
            .setReadTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(500))
            .build();
}

Manual creation of RestTemplate instances is a potentially troublesome approach because other auto-configured beans are not being injected in manually created instances.

For Spring Boot >= 1.4

@Configuration
public class AppConfig
{
    @Bean
    public RestTemplate restTemplate(RestTemplateBuilder restTemplateBuilder) 
    {
        return restTemplateBuilder
           .setConnectTimeout(...)
           .setReadTimeout(...)
           .build();
    }
}

---

For Spring Boot <= 1.3

@Configuration
public class AppConfig
{
    @Bean
    @ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "custom.rest.connection")
    public HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory customHttpRequestFactory() 
    {
        return new HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory();
    }

    @Bean
    public RestTemplate customRestTemplate()
    {
        return new RestTemplate(customHttpRequestFactory());
    }
}

then in your application.properties

custom.rest.connection.connection-request-timeout=...
custom.rest.connection.connect-timeout=...
custom.rest.connection.read-timeout=...

This works because HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory has public setters connectionRequestTimeout, connectTimeout, and readTimeout and @ConfigurationProperties sets them for you.

---

For Spring 4.1 or Spring 5 without Spring Boot using @Configuration instead of XML

@Configuration
public class AppConfig
{
    @Bean
    public RestTemplate customRestTemplate()
    {
        HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory httpRequestFactory = new HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory();
        httpRequestFactory.setConnectionRequestTimeout(...);
        httpRequestFactory.setConnectTimeout(...);
        httpRequestFactory.setReadTimeout(...);

        return new RestTemplate(httpRequestFactory);
    }
}

I finally got this working.

I think the fact that our project had two different versions of the commons-httpclient jar wasn't helping. Once I sorted that out I found you can do two things...

In code you can put the following:

HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory rf =
    (HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory) restTemplate.getRequestFactory();
rf.setReadTimeout(1 * 1000);
rf.setConnectTimeout(1 * 1000);

The first time this code is called it will set the timeout for the HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory class used by the RestTemplate. Therefore, all subsequent calls made by RestTemplate will use the timeout settings defined above.

Or the better option is to do this:

<bean id="RestOperations" class="org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate">
    <constructor-arg>
        <bean class="org.springframework.http.client.HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory">
            <property name="readTimeout" value="${application.urlReadTimeout}" />
            <property name="connectTimeout" value="${application.urlConnectionTimeout}" />
        </bean>
    </constructor-arg>
</bean>

Where I use the RestOperations interface in my code and get the timeout values from a properties file.