How to make a custom exception class with multiple init args pickleable

The current answers break down if you’re using both arguments to construct an error message to pass to the parent Exception class. I believe the best way is to simply override the __reduce__ method in your exception. The __reduce__ method should return a two item tuple. The first item in the tuple is your class. The second item is a tuple containing the arguments to pass to your class’s __init__ method.

import pickle

class MyException(Exception):
    def __init__(self, arg1, arg2):
        self.arg1 = arg1
        self.arg2 = arg2

        super(MyException, self).__init__('arg1: {}, arg2: {}'.format(arg1, arg2))

    def __reduce__(self):
        return (MyException, (self.arg1, self.arg2))


original = MyException('foo', 'bar')
print repr(original)
print original.arg1
print original.arg2

reconstituted = pickle.loads(pickle.dumps(original))
print repr(reconstituted)
print reconstituted.arg1
print reconstituted.arg2

More info about __reduce__ here.